by Billy Jensen
Contra Costa detectives visited with Vanner. He was willing to go with them to their headquarters to answer questions. Detective Roxane Gruenheid rode next to him in the back of the squad car. He was very chatty, his blue eyes lighting up with the small talk.
Vanner willingly gave his fingerprints. The detectives had a hunch he had been arrested before. But in the years since he had last been through the procedure, things had changed. Live Scan fingerprinting technology had replaced the old paper and ink method.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) maintains the statewide criminal record repository for California. Every person who has ever been arrested gets a record of arrests and prosecutions (RAP) sheet, and the fingerprints they provide at the time of the arrest are attached to the RAP sheet as the unique identifier to show exactly who the person is. Matching the new fingerprints to the ones in the database used to take days. But with Live Scan, it took a few hours. While the detectives were waiting for the results, Gruenheid kept talking to Vanner.
She noticed that Vanner’s accent sounded like he might have spent time on the East Coast.
“Your accent’s really interesting,” she said, trying to keep up the banter. “Where did you grow up?”
Vanner leaned in close to Gruenheid, so close she could feel his breath. Then he growled, “That’s none of your goddamned business.”
“It was like a flick of a switch, from what his normal behavior was,” Gruenheid said. “And then he switched it off again and kept carrying on as normal.”
Vanner really didn’t want to talk about who he was or where he was from.
When the detectives asked about Jun, he gave what they thought were evasive answers. They also noticed that he referred to her in the past tense. But they really didn’t have anything to hold him on.
Gruenheid kept up the idle chitchat with Vanner. Then the results came back.
Vanner’s fingerprints matched a profile in the DOJ system. The name? Curtis Mayo Kimball. Kimball had a warrant out for his arrest after he had failed to meet with his parole officer. He was arrested for violating his parole in 1990—after serving time for abandoning a child at a trailer park. That child was little Lisa. It was enough for Gruenheid to arrest him and get a search warrant for the property in Richmond.
Gruenheid drove to the house on Bernhard Avenue in Richmond. She uncovered a home in a strange state. None of Jun’s possessions—or any women’s clothing or effects, for that matter—were found inside. Over the back fence, she saw a dried-up, dead kitten. She entered a padlocked garage and saw a collection of pottery that Jun had made, next to her wheel and kiln. Passing by the pottery, she walked deeper into the garage until she came upon a peculiar site—a 250-pound mountain of kitty litter piled high next to the water heater. Gruenheid moved the litter around a bit. After a few seconds, she spotted an outline of something hard in the sand. She brushed away more of the litter, and the object was revealed. It was a human foot, connected to a flip-flop. She called in the forensics team. They dug into the kitty litter pile and discovered the body of Eunsoon Jun. She had died from blunt-force trauma to the head. Police said the kitty litter masked the stench of her decaying flesh.
Larry Vanner was arrested for murder. He didn’t want to go through a trial. He pled guilty and received fifteen years to life. But the story was far, far from over.
California now had three identities for this man: Larry Vanner, Curtis Mayo Kimball, and Gordon Jenson, all with the same fingerprints. Vanner, the convicted murderer, was the same man who had abandoned his five-year-old daughter Lisa with the couple from the trailer park.
But was little Lisa really his daughter?
“I started to get a really strong feeling—I did not believe that Lisa was his daughter,” Gruenheid said. “I was really concerned about where he had gotten her.”
In August 2003, Gruenheid requested that Lisa’s DNA be tested and compared to Jenson/Vanner/Kimball’s. Her hunch paid off. He was not her father. He was not her grandfather. He was not her uncle or cousin. He wasn’t related to her at all. Who was Vanner to this little girl? And there was an even more pressing question: where was the little girl’s mother?
They tried talking to Vanner in prison, but he denied even knowing Lisa.
Seven years went by. Vanner died in prison in December 2010 at sixty-seven years old, taking his secrets with him. Or so he thought.
Little Lisa was now a grown woman with a husband and children of her own. But she was still left wondering where she came from. Her memories of her childhood were foggy—she remembered only being given away by a man. In 2014, a genetic genealogist, or “search angel,” from DNAAdoption.com, worked with Lisa to try to find any of her relatives and hopefully answer some of the questions she had about where she came from. She entered Lisa’s DNA into a public online DNA database and found a cousin in New Hampshire. The cousin led to Lisa’s grandfather—and to a devastating secret.
Lisa discovered that the name she was born with wasn’t Lisa. It was Dawn. And her mother’s name was Denise Beaudin. Lisa was happy to connect with her grandfather, but neither he nor anyone else knew the answer to the biggest question that had troubled her for years: where was her mother?
In 1981, Denise Beaudin was living in Manchester, New Hampshire. On November 26 of that year, she attended Thanksgiving dinner at her family home in Goffstown with her new boyfriend, a man she introduced as Bob Evans. A week later, her family went to visit her apartment in Manchester and discovered the house was empty. The family had heard that Denise and Evans owed money to people around town and thought they were just trying to get out from under the debt by going on the run. So maybe they packed up Denise’s six-month-old daughter, grabbed a few clothes, and split.
But her parents never heard from Denise again.
Three decades later, when New Hampshire authorities learned that Lisa’s mother was Denise Beaudin, they wondered if it could be a giant piece of the puzzle that could lead to solving the state’s biggest murder mystery. Manchester was only thirteen miles from Allenstown. Denise went missing in 1981. And a missing-persons report was never filed.
Could Denise Beaudin be the woman found with the three little girls in the barrels in Bear Brook State Park in Allenstown? Could Bob Evans be the villain responsible for the crime that had haunted them for thirty years?
“The chances are pretty slim.” That’s what the assistant DA had told me a year earlier when I asked if the case would ever be solved. He told me that six hours before I learned Michelle had died and everything went haywire and sent me on this journey. “Pretty slim.” That was a gut punch of a quote. But now there was this. Now there was hope.
Police began digging into the past of Bob Evans. From a tip, they learned that Evans was acquainted with and may have worked for the owner of the Bear Brook Store property dump site, where the bodies in the barrels were found. They learned that he had actually used the site for dumping trash in the past. They learned he had worked as an electrician, and electrical wiring was found in the barrels along with the victims.
In January 2017, New Hampshire authorities announced a press conference concerning the Allenstown Four cold case. Ronda Randall, the citizen detective who walked those woods with me a year earlier, drove up to be there in person. She took with her four rocks that she had collected from the woods years ago. All along, her plan was that when she learned the names of the victims, she would write their names on those rocks. She was finally going to get her chance to do it. I watched a live stream of the conference over Facebook. We were seconds away from finding out the names of the woman and three little girls who were found in the barrels in Allenstown.
Assistant DA Strelzin, New Hampshire Cold Case Unit detective Michael Kokoski, and Manchester Police detective captain Ryan Grant approached the podium. I leaned into my computer, wanting to crawl through the screen to get a better seat.
When the first bo
dies were found in 1985, many locals’ thoughts went straight to eight-year-old Tammy Belanger, who had gone missing while walking to Lincoln Street Elementary School a year earlier. Some thought of twenty-one-year-old Lisa Snyder, who was last seen on July 4, 1985, in Dover, heading to a bar called the Norseman. Or of fifteen-year-old Shirley McBride, reported missing on July 13, 1985, in Pittsfield. Or twenty-one-year-old Page Jennings, last seen January 16, 1985, after her parents were killed.
But one by one, those women and girls, along with thousands of others, were ruled out as the victims.
Detectives drilled deep into the cast of ne’er-do-wells who were around Allenstown at the time. A man named Robert Callahan, who was convicted of sexually assaulting a minor and spent five years in the New Hampshire prison system, lived on the property and was said to have at one point taken in “a woman who had nowhere to go.” A Bear Brook Gardens resident named Robert Steffen had been convicted of molesting children in 1985. Pembroke, New Hampshire, produced a child pornographer named Brian Schultz, who might have taken young children from across the country to film bizarre sex acts, including filming them having sex with animals and eating feces. Robert Breest, who was convicted of killing eighteen-year-old Susan Randall and leaving her body under a bridge in Concord, New Hampshire, once lived in Allenstown.
But one by one, those men, along with thousands of others, were ruled out as the killer.
A few years ago, when the victims’ DNA was finally extracted and entered into some databases looking for a match, they found nothing. Law enforcement then turned to pollen analysis to attempt to identify where the victims might have lived or traveled. Plants can spread microscopic pollen and spores in the air, which are then carried by the wind and land on the ground—and on people’s clothing and hair. Different regions have different types of plants, and there are more than 380,000 different types of plants on earth. The pollen they produce is unique to each region and creates a “pollen print” of their location. You can’t drill down to a neighborhood, but you can get an idea of the general area where the pollen is from—the Pacific Northwest, the American Midwest, etc. And pollen is incredibly resilient, sticking to clothing even after multiple washes. Officials were hopeful that pollen could lead to a location where they could concentrate efforts to identify the victims. But the results of the tests were too broad, spreading across dozens of states.
They tried studying the hair, teeth, and bones of the victims, searching for the chemical isotopes they contained. Strontium, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen-18, oxygen-16, and lead can help investigators narrow down where individuals might have lived, based on the food and drink they consumed. Oxygen can point to the drinking water of a specific location.
The isotopes directed investigators to small pockets in Maine, New Hampshire, and northern New York, along with a thick U-shaped pattern starting from interior Washington, dipping down through Arizona and New Mexico and up through the Dakotas. A pretty wide swath. But the results for the one unrelated child were far less broad, showing that she had only lived in the Northeast. To add another piece to the puzzle, the test concluded that all four females did live together in New Hampshire at some point before their deaths.
But after all those tests and theories and Hail Marys, we were finally going to get their names at this press conference. It was finally going to be over.
And then they gave us the news. The woman in the barrel was not Denise Beaudin. They still didn’t know who she was. And they still didn’t who the three little girls were. The mystery was still stubbornly intact. We wouldn’t learn their names that day. But we would learn the next best thing. We would learn the name of the man who killed them.
When little Lisa’s DNA provided no connections to any of the four females in the barrels, law enforcement then decided to compare the DNA from the barrels against the DNA of the man who had molested and abandoned Lisa at the trailer park, Gordon Jenson.
They got a match.
Jenson was revealed to be the biological father of the youngest girl in the barrels, the girl who was not related to the other three females. Jenson was undoubtedly Bob Evans, the man last seen with Lisa’s mother, Denise Beaudin. And remember Jenson was also known as Larry Vanner, the man who killed Eunsoon Jun. He undoubtedly killed the woman and three little girls in the barrels.
He also presumably murdered Denise Beaudin and buried her somewhere between New Hampshire and California. The authorities were not even sure what his real name was. Gordon Jenson. Larry Vanner. Bob Evans. At the press conference, they flashed his picture on the screen behind the podium, and America was introduced to the most horrifying serial killer it had never heard of.
Lisa didn’t attend the conference, but Strelzin read a statement she had written. She was thankful she was “reunited with my grandfather and cousins after all these years.
“Currently, I have three beautiful children and a loving husband and would like our presently happy and secure life to remain intact and protected,” she continued. “Please turn your focus toward the unidentified victims and other potentially unknown victims in this case.”
Assuming Jenson/Evans murdered at least two women (Denise Beaudin and Eunsoon Jun) and three little girls, the miracle in the whole story up to that point was Lisa herself. Why did he give Lisa away instead of “solving” his problems the way he presumably did in Allenstown? Why did Lisa survive?
Giving little Lisa away was what got him in the end, as her DNA, a familial DNA search, and old-fashioned detective work led law enforcement back to him. It was the same way I knew the Golden State Killer could be caught.
We continued to enter the Golden State Killer’s Y-STR DNA profile into the public genealogy databases, but there were only about a half a million samples in those systems. And it wasn’t his whole genome profile. I know I said this before, but I was sure that the answer was hiding behind those locked doors of 23andMe and Ancestry.com. There were millions of profiles of white European men in their databases. Those people with European ancestry were most likely to order the kit, spit in the tube, and try to find out both where they were from and what diseases they might be more susceptible to. And we were looking for a white male of European descent. Odds were one of his third or fourth cousins spit into one of those tubes. But the doors to those matches were still locked to us.
I had spoken with some geneticist friends of Kendall’s, who said it might be possible to extract the DNA from the rape kits collected at the GSK crime scenes and place it in a saliva-like substance to send in the spit tube that 23andMe and Ancestry require. They would be none the wiser. The lab tech would open the box, remove the tube, extract the DNA, and upload it to the database. They would then email us the results, with all of “our” relatives that they found matches to. Then we would work with genealogists to build the family tree headed straight for the killer. We would have his identity in a matter of weeks. It would be violating the company’s terms of use, but would it be illegal?
I explained the plan to one of the investigators on the case. They told me flat out, “Billy, if I was retiring next week, I would definitely think about doing that. But I’ve got a lot more years.”
I understood. They couldn’t risk their job taking a chance on a constitutionally ambiguous search.
But the family tree worked in New Hampshire. It started with a detective’s hunch and an orphan looking for her parents and led to a serial killer. Police were now in a peculiar position—they had the killer of the four females in the barrels but still did not know the identity of the victims. But it was enough to take to the public to ask if anyone remembered the man, and that was what they focused on for the rest of the press conference. They showed a map with all the places (with corresponding dates) that he may have visited throughout the United States. They listed all his known aliases, occupations, and other scraps of information they had compiled. Because he very well may have killed a lot more people.
&nb
sp; Myself, Ronda, and a host of citizen detectives online started frantically digging through census reports, newspaper clippings, and old high school yearbooks to learn anything we could about the man they were calling Bob Evans. Any stop he may have made across the country might have been a stop for murder. Did any women disappear near any of the places he traveled?
Strelzin called Evans “cold and calculating” and said that he sexually abused some of his victims. The scenario that became apparent was that of a man who would meet a woman with a child and separate them from their family and friends. He would then kill the woman and abduct and molest the child. Then he would play the part of a struggling father raising a child in an attempt to romance another single mother. Then he would molest her children, kill the woman—and kill the first child—take the new child/children, and start the sadistic circle all over again.
I was focusing on the names Donna and Elizabeth as possible other victims. Remember when Gordon Jenson told the people at the trailer park that Lisa’s mother was named Denise LaPorte and she was killed in Texas? Since he used Denise Beaudin’s correct first name, maybe he followed that pattern with other women he killed. He referred to his wife by the name Elizabeth in arrest reports. An October 1986 article in the San Bernardino County Sun stated that
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… Investigators also have received information that Lisa may have a 2- or 3-year-old sister.
Are you ready to follow the trail of one of the most sadistic serial killers the world never knew it produced? The man who would sidle up to a mother and children, molest the children, kill the mother, use the children to lure another set of mother and children into his web, then kill the first children until he “marries” a woman in a Star Trek–wedding ceremony, kills her, and buries her body under a 250-pound pile of kitty litter?
