What we know- and don't know- about alleged serial killer 'Robert Evans' (June 21, 2017)
2002 police interview with man known as 'Bob Evans' (video released June 20, 2017)
Part 1 and Part 2 of new CRIME WATCH DAILY episode (May 31, 2017)
Finding Lisa: a story of murders, mysteries, loss, and, incredibly, new life (May 13, 2017)
Allenstown property searched April 26, 2017 (video)
AG says search of Allenstown property turn up nothing (April 27)
Area where bodies found in barrels searched again (April 26)
"Who am I Lisa" Cold Case Solved After 30 Years (San Bernadino County Sheriff's Department- Pg 11)
NH investigators pledge to identify Bob Evans'
victims By SHAWNE K.
WICKHAM Union Leader January 29, 2017
Four victims,
three of them little girls, thrown away like garbage, their bodies wrapped in
plastic trash bags, bound with electrical wiring and stuffed in barrels.
Four people
with no one to mourn them.
Last week,
authorities moved closer to solving a mystery that had confounded them for
decades. They now believe a man who killed a California woman in 2002 was
responsible for the Allenstown murders - and the likely murder of Denise
Beaudin, a 23-year-old Goffstown woman missing since 1981.
Still, so many
questions remain unanswered.
-What happened to Denise? She left Manchester with her 6-month-old baby Dawn
and a man calling himself Bob Evans - the man police now believe was a serial
killer.
-Where did Evans go between 1981 and 1984, when he showed up in California with
Beaudin's daughter, calling her Lisa?
-Where was Evans - aka Curtis Kimball, Gordon Jenson (or Jensen), Larry Vanner
and Gerald Mockerman - between 1990, when he fled parole in California, and
2002, when he reappeared in the Golden State and went to prison for murdering
his girlfriend?
-Who - and where - is the mother of his child? The remains of a little girl,
believed to be 2-to-4 years old, were found with those of a younger girl in a
barrel in Allenstown in 2000. DNA testing proved Evans was her father.
Officials fear her mother may be one of his victims too.
-Who is the father of the other two children found in Allenstown?
-How many victims are there - and where?
Senior
Assistant Attorney General Jeffery Strelzin last week said police usually start
with a victim and look for the murderer. Here, police believe they have their
man but the identity of his victims remains illusive.
Authorities
said they hope to learn more about Evans' whereabouts and activities during
that 12-year gap between 1990 and 2002. They know he stole a car in Idaho in
1988, and have cited 11 other states and Quebec, Canada, as other places Evans
may have been in the 1970s and 1980s.
But Detective
Sgt. Michael Kokoski of the New Hampshire State Police cold case unit said he's
also concerned about where Evans was - and what he did - before he arrived in
Manchester in the late 1970s.
Evans would
have been in his early to mid-30s back then, and Kokoski said those years are
when killers are most likely to commit their crimes.
"The
bottom line is, with somebody who has potentially traveled this extensively,
really nothing is off the table in terms of the possibilities of where he's
been or what he's done."
Kokoski said
it's gratifying to have at least some answers in a case that has vexed
officials for decades. But he said there's a lot of work yet to be done, to
really solve the case.
Carol
Schweitzer of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children said
she's more optimistic than ever that the Allenstown victims will be identified,
with the public's help. "It's just a matter of time," she said.
No bit of
information is too minor to report. "The smallest thing could really help
blow this thing wide open."
Someone out
there knew this woman, these children, Schweitzer said. The girls had fathers; the
adult woman had parents, other relatives.
They must have
gone to doctors, dentists, school. "I think there are people who remember
her, that miss them," she said. "I think we just haven't found them
yet. They haven't been able to connect this story to their circumstances and
what could have happened to their missing loved ones."
Kokoski said
state police have received about two dozen tips since last Thursday's news
conference.
For those who
have worked on the Allenstown case for years, justice means finding the
identity of the victims.
Shaun
Mulholland is town manager in Allenstown; until 2013, he was the town's police
chief. He said the inability to identify the woman and children whose bodies
were disposed of in barrels has been an "immense frustration" all
these years.
"Finding
out the identities of the victims is critical," Mulholland said.
Schweitzer
agreed. "You had an offender that killed four people, put them in barrels,
put them in the woods, hoping that they were never going to be found," she
said. "Well, they were.
"They were
found; they were not forgotten."
And Kokoski
vowed, "This case will not be closed until we know who these victims are
and until we're confident we don't have any others out there."
DNA led victim's daughter to Granite State, revealing
her link to Allenstown murders By SHAWNE K. WICKHAM Union Leader
January 28, 2017
An adopted
daughter's search for her identity was the break in a decades-old case that led
New Hampshire authorities to the man they believe killed victims on both
coasts.
The woman at the heart of the disturbing case, revealed by authorities last
week at a news conference in Concord, grew up thinking of herself as Lisa
Jenson.
Now in her mid-30s, she recently learned that the man she once
thought of as her father was a serial killer - and most likely murdered her
mother.
Authorities also believe that man, who called himself Bob Evans when he
lived in New Hampshire, murdered a woman and three young girls whose bodies
were dumped in barrels in Allenstown sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s.
Evans died in 2010 in a California prison, where he was serving time for the
2002 murder of a girlfriend.
Carol Schweitzer is supervisor of the forensic services unit at the
National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). She's been
working on the Allenstown case for years - and also helped Lisa discover her
true identity.
Schweitzer said the connection to Lisa's case began in 2004,
when California authorities asked for the center's help to identify a child
who had been abandoned 19 years earlier in a trailer park by a man they thought
was her father.
"They knew she was abandoned in 1985 and they had never been able to
locate her family because the offender absconded after he abandoned her,"
she said.
But in 2002, a man calling himself Larry Vanner was arrested for murder
in Contra Costa County, Calif. The dismembered body of Eunsoon Jun was
discovered in the basement of the home she had shared with Vanner; a bloody
saw, axe and meat cleaver were found nearby.
Investigators learned that Vanner had gone by several aliases over the years.
They matched his fingerprints to those of Curtis Kimball, a man wanted for a
parole violation 12 years earlier.
That man had served time for abandoning his daughter in 1985, when
he was going by the name Gordon Jenson. But he fled parole and was a fugitive
for 12 years before reappearing in California in 2002 as Larry Vanner.
And that, Schweitzer said, is when authorities learned through DNA testing that
the man who had abandoned Lisa was not her biological father.
"That's when everyone started asking, where did he get her from?"
recalled Peter Headley, a deputy sheriff with the San Bernadino County
(Calif.) Sheriff's Department. "Who is she?"
No longer was it a case of child abandonment; now police were
looking at an abduction.
In 2004, the San Bernadino department contacted NCMEC asking if Lisa matched
the description of any of the missing children they had in their files.
She didn't.
Headley said his department spent years trying to follow Curtis
Kimball's trail backward to try to figure out who Lisa was and where she'd come
from.
Detectives even interviewed Vanner in prison, he said. "He would not even
admit to knowing who she is or having her. At that point he just denied
everything."
In 2014, they decided to try to learn Lisa's identity through one of the online
DNA databases that folks can use to search their family histories. Working with
a genetic genealogist, they submitted Lisa's DNA and hoped for a match.
And last year they found one, a cousin in New Hampshire.
Lisa, Headley said, "has always been extremely grateful
for everything anybody does for her."
So he said, "It was just great to be able to call her up and tell her we
figured out who she is."
Headley said they were able to confirm her identity through her
grandfather's DNA.
But they also learned something ominous about her mother.
Denise Beaudin was just 23 years old when she and her
6-month-old daughter Dawn left Manchester just after Thanksgiving in 1981 with
a man the family knew as Bob Evans. They were never heard from again.
"The family was led to believe that Denise and the
suspect owed money to everyone and they were running from money trouble,"
Headley said. So the family never reported Denise and the baby missing.
"That's when we put it together that she's a missing
person," Headley said.
They didn't yet realize that Lisa's story was about to collide with
a decades-old murder mystery.
In 2008, New Hampshire authorities had contacted NCMEC, asking for help to
identify four victims whose bodies had been found in barrels in Allenstown
years earlier.
In 1985, a hunter had made a grisly discovery in the woods
near Bear Brook State Park: a 55-gallon barrel containing the remains of
an adult woman and a child. Fifteen years later, authorities found a second
barrel, the remains of two more little girls inside.
NCMEC had worked with forensic specialists to reconstruct what the woman
and three girls may have looked like when they were killed. And DNA testing had
revealed that the woman and two of the children were maternally related.
The third and "middle" child was an outlier, unrelated to
the rest.
Detective Sgt. Michael Kokoski of the New Hampshire State Police's cold
case unit has worked on the Allenstown case for years. He said the DNA testing
that linked Lisa to New Hampshire and Denise Beaudin - and Bob Evans - was the
key that broke open the case.
.
"If that California connection had never
been made, I don't know where we would be with these cases," he said.
Police from here and California exchanged photos that proved Evans
was the same man who called himself Vanner, Gordon and Kimball,
Kokoski said.
"You had somebody who's a convicted murderer and now you've got him tied
to New Hampshire, tied to the disappearance of a woman that nobody has known is
missing."
And right away, he said, Manchester and state police started
wondering if there was a connection to the Allenstown victims.
They learned that Evans had worked at the Waumbec Mills in Manchester as an
electrician. He had also done some work for the man who owned the Allenstown
property where the victims were found - including dumping waste from the mill
at that property, according to authorities.
The Allenstown victims had been wrapped in plastic and electrical wiring.
The evidence seemed promising.
Police in California had Evans' DNA; authorities sent it out
to test for a match to the Allenstown victims.
"It was almost like a shot in the dark," Schweitzer recalled.
And last October, the testing found the link investigators were looking for:
Bob Evans was the biological father of the middle child, the one who was
unrelated to the other three victims.
That, Kokoski recalled, "was the real Eureka moment, that
connection to the victims."
Kokoski said Evans' name had actually surfaced in 2014, but
investigators couldn't find anything to tie him to the Allenstown case.
"With this California nexus, and the direct link to the victims,
that was huge," he said.
"We were all shocked," Schweitzer recalled, "but at the
same time very pleased to hear that this was an answer we had been waiting for
for a long time."
And now, she said, "We're more optimistic than ever to be able to identify
these victims, knowing this piece."
One possible scenario is that Evans and his daughter met a woman who had
two girls of her own. "Did he come into town with his daughter, posing as
a single dad?" Schweitzer asked.
That's what he did when he arrived in California in 1984, posing as Lisa's
father, she said. "I think it's very possible that he met this other
family when it was just him and his daughter, but we don't know that."
Kokoski said it's likely that Evans killed the Allenstown victims before he got
involved with Denise Beaudin. Police are hoping to jog the memories of people
who may remember a man with a young daughter who spent time with a woman who
had two girls of her own.
As strange and terrible as her early childhood was, in the end Lisa was the
lucky one.
The man who apparently killed his own daughter and stuffed her small body in a
barrel spared Denise Beaudin's daughter, leaving her behind with kindly
strangers before vanishing.
"It is a mystery," Schweitzer said. "We can't start
rationalizing the decisions he made. We can just start trying to identify the
ones that he made so we can find Denise, and identify the family (found) in New
Hampshire, if not other victims he had across the country."
The Allenstown children would be about Lisa's age had they lived,
noted Kokoski, who called Lisa "a remarkable woman."
And if there's a silver lining to what she has endured, he said, it's
"that ultimately all these years later, her story would dovetail with
these stories out there, and ultimately the hope is she's going to give some
hope to the identification of these children."
Headley, who has stayed in touch with Lisa, said "it's been an
emotional roller coaster for her."
At last week's news conference, Senior Assistant Attorney
General Jeffery Strelzin read a statement from Lisa, expressing gratitude to
those who have helped her. "I am so thankful to be reunited with my
Grandfather and cousins after all these years," she said.
She asked the media to respect her privacy.
"Currently I have three beautiful children and a loving husband, and would
like our presently happy and secure life to remain intact and protected through
the release of this story," she wrote.
"Please turn your focus toward the unidentified victims, and other
potentially unknown victims in this case, and hopefully their families will
also be offered some closure as this investigation continues."
Finding the Allenstown killer: Calif. case shows
killer's
lies
By SHAWN K.
WICKHAM Union Leader January 28, 2017
When police in Contra Costa County, Calif., questioned
the man calling himself Lawrence William Vanner about his missing girlfriend,
he insisted she was fine and was in Oregon.
But detectives
noticed he spoke of her in the past tense.
It was September of 2002 and friends and relatives of Eunsoon Jun, a petite,
dark-haired woman who had moved to California from Korea, were worried. No one
had seen or heard from her in months, according to a 2002 affidavit by a
California homicide detective.
Eunsoon met Larry Vanner when he answered her ad for a handyman, a cousin told
an NBC reporter. He moved in with her, and the two later held a commitment
ceremony in a friend's backyard.
But according to the affidavit, Eunsoon had told a close friend they had argued
over finances and about having children: She wanted them; Larry did not.
After Eunsoon disappeared, Vanner told some friends that she had gone to
Virginia to take care of her mother; he told others she was in Oregon, working
on a cabin they were building there.
Later, Vanner told investigators that Eunsoon didn't want to be found, but that
she was alive and in Oregon.
When they ran his fingerprints, they learned that Vanner was Curtis Mayo
Kimball, who was wanted for skipping parole 12 years earlier.
A pre-sentence probation report revealed that Kimball had been arrested in 1989
for child abandonment and molestation.
Kimball had been living in a trailer park in Scotts Valley, Calif., in 1986
under the name Gordon Curtis Jenson. With him was a 4- or 5-year-old girl named
Lisa.
A neighboring couple had gotten friendly with Jenson and his little girl. When
the neighbor mentioned that her daughter was having trouble conceiving, she was
shocked when Jenson suggested she could adopt Lisa, according to the report.
Jenson gave the child to them for a two week "trial period."
"Jenson said Lisa's mother had been killed in a traffic accident in Texas,
but he told other people that Lisa's mother (his wife) was killed in a robbery
in Texas," the report stated.
The woman's daughter and her husband wanted to keep the child and contacted a
lawyer, who advised them to get Lisa's birth certificate and her mother's death
certificate.
But Jenson had fled, leaving Lisa behind.
Lisa was placed in a foster home and later adopted by a police officer.
After Kimball was arrested in California in 1989, he pleaded guilty to the
child abandonment charge. The molestation charges were dismissed because Lisa's
adoptive parents did not want her to have to testify in court, according to the
court documents.
Kimball went to jail and was paroled in 1990. He fled the next day and spent 12
years as a fugitive, until he surfaced in Contra Costa County as Larry Vanner.
"The authorities were never able to determine whether or not Lisa was
Jenson's biological daughter, and there was suspicion that she may have been
kidnapped but that was never proven either. To (this) day that information is not
known," the probation report concluded.
Police searched Eunsoon Jun's home on Sept. 26, 2002. In a dirt basement, they
found a pile of clean kitty litter.
An investigator noticed some tools near the pile - a saw, an axe and a meat
cleaver - that appeared to have hair on them.
Then they saw a woman's sandal sticking out of the pile.
Investigators had found Eunsoon Jun.
Vanner - the man who called himself Bob Evans when he lived in Manchester,
N.H., in the late 1970s and early 1980s - was convicted of her murder in 2003
and sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.
He died in prison on Dec. 28, 2010, having never disclosed who the child Lisa
was and where she was from.
Bob Evans, Drifter Accused of Killing 6, Was ‘Pure
Evil’ by Tracy
Connor NBC January 28, 2017
The first time Elaine
Ramos laid eyes on her cousin's new boyfriend she sensed he was "pure
evil."
"She brought him
to a New Year's Eve party. I opened the door to him and it was the first time
in my life the hairs on the back of my hand raised up. A chill came over
me," Ramos said.
"I couldn't even
reach out my hand to shake his hand. He was the creepiest person ever."
Within two years,
Ramos' cousin, a free-spirited chemist named Eunsoon Jun, was dead, her body
found buried under kitty litter in the basement of her northern California home
in 2002.
The boyfriend was
charged with her murder, pleaded no contest and died in prison in 2010 -- and
Jun's family tried to forget about the domineering drifter who stole her heart
and snuffed out her life.
Then about two months
ago, police from New Hampshire called with disturbing news: They had uncovered
evidence that Jun's killer, known to her family as Larry Vanner, was tied to
two icy-cold cases.
At a press conference
this week, investigators revealed what they had learned about the hard-drinking
electrician with half a dozen aliases, a long rap sheet and an apparent thirst
for violence.
Through DNA, they
linked him to the unidentified bodies of a young woman and three girls -- one
his own daughter -- who were killed in the early 1980s and dumped in industrial
barrels in the woods of Allenstown, New Hampshire.
They had also
determined that he was the same man, then known as Bob Evans, who vanished from
Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1981 with a 23-year-old girlfriend, Denise
Beaudin, and her infant daughter, Dawn.
Beaudin was never
heard from again and police believe Evans killed her somewhere between New
Hampshire and California. He kept her daughter for several years, renaming her
Lisa, before abandoning her at a California campground in 1986.
Assuming a series of
bogus identities, the man flitted around California, working as a handyman,
living in trailer parks and getting into scrapes with the law. After an
18-month stint in prison, he went on the run and law enforcement lost track of
him.
He resurfaced more
than a decade later as Vanner, working as a handyman in the Bay Area, where he
fatefully crossed paths with Jun.
Born in Korea, Jun
had moved to the U.S. with her family as a teenager. She earned a master's
degree and worked as a chemist at Bio-Rad Laboratories.
"She was a
bohemian," Ramos recalled. "She loved to travel. She went to India to
meet the Maharaji. She was a free spirit and that's why she was so accepting of
people."
The 45-year-old was
also lonely.
"She ran an ad
for a handyman -- she wanted to fix things up around the house -- and he
answered and just swooned her up," Ramos said.
Ramos said as soon as
she met the haggard-looking man who called himself Larry Vanner, alarm bells
went off. He had a hostile stare and a bizarre back story.
"He said he
owned lots of property, that he was a self-made millionaire, that he used to be
a colonel in the Army and that he worked for the CIA and if he wanted to
disappear, he could disappear just like that," she said.
When a skeptical
Ramos pressed him for details about his properties, he grew angry.
"He looked at me
and said, 'Don't you ever question anything I ever tell you' -- and I knew
something wasn't right about him," she said.
After Ramos expressed
her misgivings, Jun started sending angry letters telling her cousin she
couldn't understand their love and cutting off contact. Ramos wasn't there when
Vanner "married" Jun in an unofficial backyard ceremony in 2001.
Jun also sent her
mother, who lived with her, to stay with an aunt on the East Coast, Ramos said.
And then she stopped answering calls from relatives and friends.
A close pal
confronted Vanner and was given a series of conflicting explanations about
Jun's absence. Police got a search warrant for the house after they learned
about Vanner's checkered past and couldn't get straight answers about Jun's
whereabouts.
After investigators
found Jun's body, they determined she had been killed several months earlier by
a blow to the head. In a surprise move, Vanner took a plea deal that would keep
him in prison for the rest of his life.
Police, however, kept
digging into Vanner's tangled history. A child-abandonment charge on his record
led them to Lisa, who had been placed in foster care and then adopted after she
was dumped at the campground.
Tests in 2003
revealed that Vanner was not Lisa's father. With the help of police and
genealogists, she continued to delve into her past even after Vanner's
death.
The search did not
bear fruit until last summer, when the DNA trail led to a cousin in New
Hampshire. Lisa found out she was the daughter of Denise Beaudin and
investigators discovered that Vanner was also Evans.
Then three months
later, another bombshell: a match between Vanner's DNA and one of the bodies
from the barrels in Allenstown.
Officials fear Vanner
may have killed other people they don't know about and they appealed to the
public for more information about his life, particularly during the
1990s.
"This is
somebody who targets females, and children as well. We know he is an
abuser," New Hampshire Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Strelzin said.
"This is a guy who was a chameleon."
Ramos said it was
upsetting but not shocking to hear the latest revelations about the man who
killed her cousin. Back in 2002, as police peeled away the layers of deceit,
she had an intuition.
"There was
something so evil about him," she said. "I just knew there had to be
more victims."
Richmond: Sordid past of Bob Evans, drifter linked to
six killings Nate Gartrell
East Bay Times January 27, 2017
MARTINEZ — Earlier
this week, authorities here linked a dead man to five unsolved killings, ending
decades of investigations and making headlines across the
nation.
The man was identified by authorities as a drifter named Bob Evans, though
he has many aliases, birth dates and supposed areas of origin. There
is one thing that everyone agrees on: He died in California’s High Desert
Prison, seven years after being convicted of murdering Eunsoon Jun,
his unofficial wife, in their Richmond home in 2002. Court documents from
Evans’ Richmond murder case tell parts of his sordid life story — how he
traveled more than 3,000 miles to California with a girl he claimed was his
daughter; gave conflicting accounts of how her mother died; and avoided being prosecuted
for child molestation, despite multiple corroborating statements from
eyewitnesses.
The
identities of four of Evans’ victims may never be known. A DNA test
proved one was his biological daughter, a young girl, whose body was found
stuffed inside a barrel in Allenstown, New Hampshire. Authorities found the
bodies of three other females — two girls and an adult — in other barrels at
the same site, but say they had no blood relation to Evans. They estimate Evans
killed them sometime in the '70s or '80s.
His fifth victim,
identified as Denise Beaudin, was Evans’ girlfriend at one point. She
disappeared from their New Hampshire home in 1981 and was never heard from
again. But Evans surfaced in California years later, under the alias Gordon
Jenson, with a young girl he claimed was his daughter, according to court
documents.
At one point, Evans
was arrested and charged with child endangerment under a different alias in
California, for driving drunk with the girl in the car. Years later, after
Evans had been arrested for killing Jun, police did a DNA test, which found
that the girl was Beaudin’s biological daughter, but wasn’t related to Evans.
As Gordon Jenson,
Evans lived in a Santa Cruz trailer park with the girl in 1986.
Neighbors later told police that Evans referred to the girl’s mother as
Denise LaPorte, and that he said she had died in Texas. He told one person
she had been in a car accident. He told another she had been murdered,
after she “panicked” during a robbery.
When a local elderly
couple mentioned to Evans that they desperately wanted a child, he offered up
the girl, left her with the couple for a “two-week trial period,” then
disappeared, according to court documents. Authorities obtained an arrest
warrant for Evans for child abandonment.
Evans eluded capture
for three years. When he was arrested, he took a plea deal and was paroled
within a year.
Decades later,
he surfaced in Richmond, under the aliases Larry Vanner and Curtis Mayo
Kimball. Authorities say he went by Dr. Vanner as well. Jun, a Korean immigrant
who had a master’s degree in chemistry from San Francisco State University,
hired him as a handyman. He soon moved in with her.
According to records,
the two became romantic. They had an unofficial wedding — with no
certification — in the summer of 2001.
It had a Star Trek theme.
Before long Jun began
complaining to friends that her husband, who she knew as Larry Vanner, was lazy
and not interested in getting a job or starting a family, according to court
documents.
In May 2002, Jun went
missing. Evans had multiple explanations for her absence: She had gone to
Virginia, or to Oregon to work on a cabin. According to court documents, when
one of Jun’s friends asked Evans why she had not shown up for an outing the two
had planned, Evans said, “Wherever the (expletive) you guys were going, she’s
not going.”
By July 2002, Evans
had started using Jun’s credit card to make purchases.
The Contra Costa
Sheriff’s Office investigated Jun’s disappearance and in November
2002 obtained a search warrant and looked inside the couple’s home at 6217
Bernhard Ave. in Richmond. In a crawl space under the house, attached to the
garage, police found Jun’s body under 250 pounds of cat litter. The detective
noted that the litter had succeeded in masking the odor of Jun’s decomposing
body.
Authorities were
skeptical of Evans’ alias, Larry Vanner, and when he was fingerprinted the FBI
determined his name was Curtis Mayo Kimball and that he was born in 1952.
Evans told neighbors in Richmond he was born in 1936, and told others he was
born in 1945, records show.
In 2003, after
spending less than a year in jail awaiting trial, Evans pleaded no contest to
second-degree murder and was sentenced to 15 years to life. He died in December
2010.
In 1986, Evans wrote a
brief autobiography that authorities later obtained. It said he was the
youngest of six kids, born to Norwegian-American parents who abused him
practically from birth, and refused to allow him to attend school. It said he
ran away from home at age 14, joined the military, then moved to Canada, where
he met Denise LaPorte. It said they married in Virginia, had a daughter, and
that Denise died in 1983.
Authorities were
unable to find any record verifying their marriage, Evans’ alleged military
service, Denise’s death, their daughter’s birth or Evans’ birth. Over the
years, Evans has claimed to be from Wyoming, Colorado, Quebec, Canada and
other places. He has been linked to several aliases in 12 states.
When authorities
announced Evans had been linked to the murders, they included a statement from
Beaudin’s daughter. It said she was married and living a happy life and asked
for the media to respect her privacy.
Anyone with
information about this case is encouraged to contact the New Hampshire State
Police Cold Case Unit at 603-223-3856 or at coldcaseunit@dos.nh.gov. They can
also reach the Manchester Police Department at 603-668-8711, or
mpdcoldcase@manchesternh.gov, or the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Children at 1-800-THE-LOST or at ncmectips@ncmec.org.
New Hampshire murder suspect could’ve had ties to
Austin
By Calily Bien January 26, 2017
AUSTIN (KXAN) —
Authorities in New Hampshire are seeking any information on a murder suspect
who had connections in Travis County during the 80s. Austin police also confirm
they are aware of the case and have been in contact with investigators.
Police say they have
a big break in the decades-old murder mystery of an unidentified woman and
three unidentified little girls found in steel barrels in Allenstown, N.H. DNA
has linked one of the victims found in the barrels to a man known as Bob Evans,
who died in prison in 2010. The DNA tests revealed the little girl, believed to
have been 2 to 4 years old, was Evans’ daughter, the suspect in her homicide.
Investigators are
hoping that by releasing information about Evans, someone will come forward who
knew him and his child. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
says the suspect referenced the state of Texas on multiple occasions. He
suggested that he spent time in Nueces County, Harris County, Dallas County,
Matagorda County and Travis County.
The suspect might
have known someone who lived at an RV park in Austin during 1986. The suspect
called two RV parks: Austin Lone Star RV Resort and Pecan Grove RV Park. During
the 70s and 80, he said he worked as an electrician, mechanic and repairman for
various companies across Texas.
Evans was dating
23-year-old Denise Beaudin in the early 80s. who police say went missing
shortly after Thanksgiving 1981 from her home in Manchester, N.H. with her
6-month-old daughter, Dawn Beaudin. Beaudin’s family believe she left New
Hampshire with Evans and traveled to Texas to avoid financial difficulties.
Authorities do not know of Denise’s whereabouts but Dawn is currently living as
“Lisa” in California.
While all four
unidentified victims were found in steel barrels and in the same area, police
found their bodies in separate searches. The first two victims were found in
1985, the other two were discovered in 2000.
-
Suspect’s work
history in Texas:
- Claimed to have
been employed as an electrician at a company called Brown and Root in
Houston, TX during the 1970s
- Claimed to have
been employed as an installation mechanic at a company called Big Three
Industries during the 1970s and 1980s
- Claimed to have
been an instrument repairman for a company called Bay City Electric, in
Bay City, TX during the 1970s
MURDER
SUSPECT WORRIED FRIENDS THOSE CLOSE TO EUNSOON JUN OF RICHMOND SAID THEY'D HAD
BAD FEELINGS ABOUT LARRY VANNER, WHO IS CHARGED IN HER DEATH Author: KARL FISCHER,
Contra Costa Times, [Walnut Creek, CA] March 2, 2003
Nobody liked the new
boyfriend much. Some said Larry Vanner looked like a street person. Family
members admit being "taken aback" the first time Eunsoon Jun brought
him over.
"He was haggard
and stoop-shouldered," said Renee Rose, who used to take pottery classes
at the Richmond Art Center with Jun. "He smoked a lot. His skin was
colorless. He did not have good color."
With varying degrees
of candor, Jun's friends and family expressed the inevitable consensus: Vanner
ranked among the biggest mistakes of her life.
But nobody thought he
would be her final mistake.
That is what police
and prosecutors claimed last week as a Contra Costa Superior Court judge held
over for trial the 65-year-old Vanner on charges he murdered the woman he
"married" in an undocumented ceremony and hid her body for four
months beneath a heap of kitty litter in the basement of their East Richmond
Heights home.
Consumed by
loneliness and desire for a family, a once-free spirit gambled all on a mystery
man and lost, said people close to Jun.
Vanner, meanwhile,
remains to authorities every bit the question mark he was during his
arraignment on murder charges in November, when he told the court the name
under which he was arrested -- and under which he served state prison time more
than a decade ago -- was not his real name.
Vanner claims his
name is Vanner. But state prison records show he shares fingerprints with a
50-year-old fugitive named Curtis Mayo Kimball, who never reported to his
parole officer after serving a state prison sentence for a child endangerment
conviction more than a decade ago.
For a tight band of
Jun's friends and family members who attended court proceedings last week, the
official slow dance toward Vanner's identity served as a macabre sideshow to an
intensely personal tragedy.
"Our feelings
about Larry caused friction between Eunsoon and all of the family. The last
conversation I had with Eunsoon, I basically tried to tell her to be
careful," said Elaine Ramos, Jun's cousin. "Soon after, a brother --
tried to get involved and warn her about Larry. She got very upset and said she
didn't want any more to do with (her brother)."
Jun, a chemist, lived
in San Francisco for many years before buying a house on Bernhard Avenue in
1996. The owner of a restaurant she frequented introduced the couple in
November 1999 after learning Jun needed work done on her roof. Vanner worked
locally as a handyman.
Less than two months
later, Jun told friends the couple was engaged. People were surprised but not
shocked. This was the woman, after all, who once spontaneously embarked on a
round-the-world trip and was famous in her social circles as an eclectic soul.
Vanner appeared to be
more dumpy and mean-spirited than suited her, people said in hindsight, but she
seemed ready to settle. Jun always wanted a husband and kids, her cousin said,
but never found a relationship.
As Jun brought Vanner
along to family gatherings in 2000, relatives began to notice little
discrepancies that added up to a larger issue: Vanner seemed to lie about his
background and finances. He said he owned a convenience store and other
properties, for example, but a family member later discovered he only worked as
a handyman at one.
Ramos said Vanner
claimed to be a "retired colonel" the first time they met, but
couldn't offer any details about his post. Family members mentioned it to Jun,
but she was undeterred, and Vanner moved into her house that fall.
In 2001, they married
in an informal backyard ceremony that was not recorded with the county.
Jun seemed a gentle
soul to her classmate Rose, someone who was eager to please and still literal
enough in her English -- her first language was Korean -- to miss jokes and be
taken in by sleight of tongue.
Rose and Jun shared a
love of the arts and of pottery. They went to trade shows together and spoke
several times a week. Jun sometimes exhibited low self-esteem, Rose said, and
was very concerned about inadvertently offending anyone.
It was that concern
coupled with some out-of-character behavior that made Rose believe she knows
when Jun died.
On May 31, 2002, Rose
called Jun's house to plan a trip to Mendocino she and Jun wanted to take the
following week. Jun sounded strained on the phone. Rose wondered if she caught
Jun at a bad time.
"She was
speaking very fast. She said, 'I'll talk to you tomorrow.' I'd never heard her
-- talk so hurriedly. Normally, she has to ruminate about things before making
a decision," Rose said. "I said to myself, 'I bet they had a
fight.'"
Jun did not call the
next morning nor did she make their date. At the time, Rose chuckled to herself
about the hard time she would give her normally punctual friend. But days
passed, and Jun did not return her calls.
The following week
Vanner phoned with a troubling story: Jun's mother, who recently moved out of
their home to live with Jun's brother in Virginia, had fallen seriously ill.
Jun had flown to be with the family.
It was the first of
many troubling stories to come from Vanner in coming weeks, Rose said, as she
"worried to the point where it consumed my life" about Jun's
well-being and made herself something of a pest.
Rose testified that
she left frequent messages on the answering machine inquiring about Jun,
wanting to talk to Jun, wanting to talk to Vanner about Jun, wanting to talk to
Vanner about Vanner. She offered to make him chili. She offered to help him
clean the house in preparation for Jun's return.
He didn't like those
ideas. He also flatly refused to provide her with a telephone number for Jun,
who he said was despondent over family troubles and was staying in a hotel
because of them. "
He said, 'Renee, I'm
sure she has more on her mind right now than wherever the (expletive) you guys
were going,'" Rose testified at the preliminary hearing.
Weeks passed. Stories
changed. At one point Vanner told Rose that Jun had finally returned -- just
for a day -- but had quickly driven off to a family meeting in Aptos, she
testified.
Later he said Jun
moved to a property the couple purportedly owned in rural Oregon to oversee
construction of a cabin and seek counseling with a therapist, Rose and a
neighbor testified. At one point Vanner went away for a few days, a neighbor
testified, on the pretense of visiting Jun.
Rose said she begged
Vanner to let her speak with Jun, just for a moment, just to make sure Jun was
OK. She said he refused, telling her Jun was too emotionally
"fragile" to speak to any of her friends.
In August, Rose left
a message saying she was leaving on vacation for 10 days and asked for Jun to
leave a message on her answering machine. It didn't happen. Finally, Rose told
Vanner she feared for Jun's safety and intended to call the police.
Vanner seemed evasive
to the sheriff's deputy who visited to check on Jun. He refused to produce Jun
or contact information for her. The case soon found its way to the sheriff's
investigations division.
"At one point,
he told me he would only speak of Jun in the past, and he only spoke about her
in the past. He did not want to talk about her current whereabouts or how she
was surviving in Oregon," sheriff's detective Justin Gregory testified.
"He would only speak about things that were gone."
The story didn't line
up well. Police soon learned that a phone number Vanner provided to reach Jun
belonged to a convenience store in Oregon, whose proprietors knew neither Jun
nor Vanner.
Police could not find
a therapist who was supposedly treating Jun. And Vanner remained obstinate
about the investigation, Gregory testified, telling police "(he) respects
us for doing our job, but it was in Jun's best interest for him not to cooperate,"
Gregory said.
Further investigation
yielded another surprise: Vanner had an arrest warrant. Police found that a
felon named Curtis Kimball failed to report to his first meeting with a parole
officer in 1991.
Armed with that
information, sheriff's deputies arrested Vanner on Sept. 17, 2002 and searched
the house.
Then came the final
surprise.
Tucked in a dark
basement, near the house's furnace, police found the desiccated body of a woman
packed in cat litter, according to police reports.
Weeks later, forensic
tests identified the woman as Jun. Police believe she died from a blow to the
head.
Vanner pleaded not
guilty to murdering Jun in December. His attorney declined comment regarding
his client's identity and details of the case last week and did not return a
phone call following the preliminary hearing.
For those who knew
Eunsoon Jun, things seem clearer in hindsight.
"Since then I've
learned a few things," said Jun's cousin Ramos, who helped put Jun's
finances in order after her death was discovered. "I get all her mail and
her credit card bills. Since she's supposedly been dead, there sure have been a
lot of charges."
Police seeking man believed to be
father of abandoned girl. San Bernadino County Sun Oct 18, 1986
Joe Gutierrez
SAN BERNADINO - A
$250,000 arrest warrant was issued Friday for a man believed to be the missing
father of 5-year-old Lisa Jensen, who was given to a Chino couple and the
placed in county custody in early August when the couple tried to adopt her.
Gordon Jensen is wanted
for investigation of child molestation and child desertion, said sheriff's
Detective Cliff Harris. The warrant was issued in Santa Cruz because the last
known sighting of Jensen was near there.
The warrant was based
on a San Bernadino County Sheriff's Department investigation and interviews
with Lisa, Harris said. Lisa was examined, but doctors could not find any
evidence of molestation, he said.
Lisa, who is living
in a foster home in San Bernadino, came to the attention of authorities Aug. 4
when a Chino woman contacted the West End Sheriff's station about adopting her,
Harris said.
The Chino woman, who
asked that her name not be revealed, said her parents had brought Lisa from
Northern California, where the girl had been living with a man identified as
her father, Gordon Jensen.
Jensen told the
parents he was seeking a better home for his daughter, Harris said.
The Chino woman took
custody of Lisa on a trial basis, but when the period was over, neither she nor
her mother could find Jensen to authorize adoption proceedings, he said.
Jensen was last seen
in Scotts Valley near Santa Cruz during the July 4 weekend. Investigators found
Jensen's fingerprints in the trailer park where he had been staying and sent
them to the Department of Justice for identification, Harris said.
Jensen's fingerprints
were matched to those of Curtis Mayo Kimball, who was arrested by Cypress
police in Orange County on May 27, 1985, for investigation of drunken driving
and child endangerment, the detective said.
According to
authorities, Kimball was married to a woman known as Donna, who works in Orange
County as a nurse and who may use the name Donna Walter, Harris said.
Investigators also have received information that Lisa may have a 2- or 3-year
old sister.
Sheriff's
investigators believe that both Jensen and Kimball are aliases. Lt. James
Marlowe said Kimball called himself a "non-person" during his arrest
in Cypress. The Sheriff's Department has few leads about Jensens' whereabouts,
Harris said. "With the warrant, this will be put on the National Crime
Information Center computer - the NCIC - and hopefully someone in some
jurisdiction will run into him."
Questions pervade child-abuse case
Santa Cruz Sentinel April 5, 1989 (Several
sentences removed from article for privacy of the child)
Santa Cruz - After a
two-year search, authorities here have arrested a man charged with molesting
his 4-year-old daughter.
Everything 43 (?) year old Gordon Curtis Jensen told neighbors at a Scotts
Valley RV park back in 1986 was a lie. Who he was, where he was from, and where
he was going, according to Assistant District Attorney, Steve Englehardt.
So Englehardt says he has no reason to believe that the 4-year-old girl who had
been living with Jenson in the back of his pickup truck - the girl Jensen is
accused of molesting and then giving away - is the man's daughter.
"My Guess is that he picked her up somewhere ... " says Inspector
Tisha Byrd, who is working to establish the girl's identity.
The little girl, named Lisa, is now six and is awaiting adoption in San
Bernadino County. She has not been able to tell authorities anything about
herself except that she knew Jenson as her father.
According to reports, Jenson had been living at Henry Cowell campground before
moving his truck and camper to the Holiday Host park in Scotts Valley in the
spring of 1986.
There he became friendly with Richard and Kathrine Decker of Fountain Valley.
That couple was living at the park while Decker worked temporarily in San Jose.
When Kathrine Decker remarked on day that she would love a granddaughter like
Lisa, but that her daughter was having difficulty conceiving a child, Jenson
had a surprise suggestion.
According to reports, he suggested that Decker's daughter adopt Lisa because he
was having trouble caring for the child. He allegedly suggested that the
daughter and her husband take Lisa on a three-week trial basis. If they liked
Lisa, they could find a "shady" lawyer to arrange a legal adoption.
Authorities say Jenson offered several explanations for how his wife died. He
told some people she died of cancer. He told others she was killed during a
robbery.
He allegedly wrote a "To whom it may concern" note which he sent down
south with his daughter. That note indicated the girl was born out of wedlock
and that the mother did not want the baby. In the note, Jenson allegedly wrote
that he feared the child might be born with Down's Syndrome because the mother
was an older woman and that he had planned to bury her "next to an ant
hill" if the baby didn't have five fingers and toes (on each limb) at
birth.
According to reports, the Decker's daughter took the child and, at the end of
three weeks, was in love with little Lisa. The woman and her husband went to a
legitimate attorney, wanting to make the adoption legal.
By then, Jenson had left the RV park and could not be found.
[The Deckers] sought help from a couselor who referred the case to the San
Bernadino Sherrif's Office. Deputies there contacted the Santa Cruz County
Sheriff's Office.
Detectives have learned that the Scotts Valley Police and the county's Child
Protective Services agency had previously responded to complaints of possible
child abuse when Jenson was living with the girl at the RV park. According to
the Scotts Valley Police report, an officer determined that Lisa was well and
showed no signs of abuse.
Although armed with new evidence, including statements from Lisa that she had
been molested, detectives here and in San Bernadino County hit a quick dead
end.
According to former Detective Joe Henard (?), now a DA's Inspector, the license
number of Jenson's truck was found to be registered to a motel room in Texas.
Jenson's job application was full of untruths, according to reports. And the
only calls Jenson made from phones at the RV park in Scotts Valley were made to
other people at other RV Parks.
"We thought we were never going to catch that guy." he said.
Then sheriff's crime scene investigator Joe Hemmingway came up with a big clue.
Hemmingway dusted with fingerprint powder every pieces of equipment that Jensen
had worked on at Holiday Host. He came up with a print from a VCR that Jenson
had repaired.
The state compuer matched the print to Curtis Mayo Kimball, Jenson's true name.
Still, two years went by and a $250,000 warrant was turning brittle.
Finally last month, Jenson turned up in Los Angeles - arrested for drunken
driving.
But for as hard as it was to track down Jenson, investigators had no luck
determining just who Lisa was. Detectives sent phots across the nation and
corresponded with every organization handling missing children cases.
Meanwhile, Lisa was placed in a foster home and, according to Assistant DA
Englehardt, is soon to be adopted.
He said she is physically and mentally healthy and ready to testify at Jenson's
preliminary hearing, which is scheduled for May 20 at Municipal court.
Englehardt said he hopes to compel Jenson to submit to a paternity test to
determine whether he is the girl's father.
Comments
Post a Comment