Transcript of S1 Episode 3: A Smaller Haystack
[SOUND OF SLIDES BEING INSERTED INTO A PROJECTOR]
Taylor Quimby, Narrating: Previously on Bear Brook…
[SOUND OF SLIDE PROJECTOR WHIRRING]
Jason Moon, In Cemetery, Reading: “Here lies the mortal remains, known only to God, of a woman, age 23 to 33, and a girl child, aged 8 to 10.”
[SOUND OF SLIDE PROJECTOR CLICKING]
Jason Moon, In Cemetery, Reading: “May their souls find peace in God’s loving care.”
[MUSIC IN, SLIDE PROJECTOR CLICKS]
John Cody: How does… an entire family… just… go missing?
[SLIDE PROJECTOR CLICKS]
Ronda Randall: What grandmother let this happen, or what neighbor, or what bus driver or, you know – I mean, Where were all of you?
[SLIDE PROJECTOR CLICKS]
Moon: Did you guys ever get as far as to have any suspects?
Cody: No. Not even close.
[SLIDE PROJECTOR CLICKS]
Kevin Flynn: After the Paquette case, you know, there was really a feeling that, yeah, you know, we – this could be done if the resources are set aside.
[SLIDE PROJECTOR CLICKS]
Ron Montplaisir: There’s always some link. Someday… somebody will come forward.
[SLIDE PROJECTOR CLICKS TWICE]
[MUSIC UP AND OUT]
[AMBIENT ROOM SOUND, PEOPLE TALKING, TAKING SEATS]
Benjamin Agati: Everybody all set? Ok? Alright... First of all, ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank you all, uh, very much for coming today. My name is Benjamin Agati. I am a senior assistant attorney general here at the Department of Justice. We have some new testing results, some significant new testing results, I think you’ll see, that we want to share, basically, with the world.
Moon Narrating: In November 2015, New Hampshire state law enforcement officials held a press conference. This is actually how I first learned about the Bear Brook murders. I was one of about a dozen or so reporters from New Hampshire and Boston who showed up. We all crowded into a small carpeted room at the New Hampshire Department of Justice. Benjamin Agati, with the AG’s office, stood behind a podium.
Agati: Thirty years ago this month, a mystery began when the remains of an adult and what we will found out will be the oldest child were discovered in a bag next to an overturned 55-gallon drum in great Bear Brook State Park. In 2000, the remains of two more victims, both young girls, were found not far away, having been located in a second 55-gallon drum.
[MUSIC IN]
Moon Narrating: The discovery of the second barrel in 2000 was really the last big development in the Bear Brook case, and that was 15 years before this press conference.
In 2009, the case had been handed over to the state’s new Cold Case Unit. The unit was the first of its kind for New Hampshire with a mandate to focus exclusively on old murders, disappearances, and suspicious deaths. It was formed thanks, in part, to the investigation into the shooting of Danny Paquette, which we talked about in the last episode.
The Cold Case Unit was just as stumped as the investigators that came before them though. So, in 2012, they took the Bear Brook mystery to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, called NCMEC [SOUNDS LIKE “NECK-MECK”] for short. NCMEC experts pored over the case alongside New Hampshire authorities, brainstorming ideas on how to move the investigation forward.
Three years later, in the fall of 2015, the New Hampshire Cold Case Unit was ready to share some of the work that came as a result of that collaboration.
Agati, At Press Conference: These are our new images. And we’ll have, uh, individual shots of each of our victims later on. [SOUND OF CAMERA SHUTTER]
Moon Narrating: They started the presentation with a closer analysis of the information investigators already had on hand. Facial reconstruction experts at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children had created new composite images of the victims. The victims’ faces are rendered in grayscale and they look a little computer generated. But certainly a lot more lifelike than the simple sketches that once hung on the refrigerator at the Morgan’s home in Allenstown.
Agati: I’d like to go through each one in particular...
Moon Narrating: Agati clicked through slides of these new images, one by one.
Agati: Our first one is our adult victim. She is a female, likely to be within her mid-20s.
Moon Narrating: The adult victim’s hair looks almost wet, like it was still drying from a shower.
Agati: Our first child victim, also found in the same barrel with her, her age is closer to 9 to 10 years old.
Moon Narrating: The oldest child victim has a few freckles on her nose.
Agati: Uh, she was approximately 4-feet-3-inches tall, had light brown dirty blonde hair.
Moon Narrating: Her mouth is slightly parted, like her photo was taken while she was lost in thought.
Agati: We do not know what her weight was specifically and we do not know her eye color. Child victim number two...
Moon Narrating: The middle child’s expression reads almost as surprise, like someone just called out her name.
Agati: She– Her age is anywhere between 2 to 4 years old.
Moon Narrating: Her hair is darker than the others, her eyes set a little further apart, details that really drive home the fact that she’s not related to the other victims.
Agati: She had a dental overbite, and this has been remarked about before, that may be noticeable to others.
Moon Narrating: The image of the youngest child shows a cute kid.
Agati: The last child. She had a very large gap between the upper two front teeth.
Moon Narrating: Big chubby cheeks and a tiny little nose. Wispy strands of dirty blond hair falling down to her shoulders.
Agati: We are trying to get these images out there. Through the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, they have not had one single case like this with four individual victims that have been unidentified for such a period of time.
[MUSIC POST]
This is Bear Brook. I’m Jason Moon.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
Moon Narrating: For me, this was my first time hearing about the Bear Brook case, so everything – the barrels, the trailer park, the faces of the victims – everything was brand new to me. But the real showcase of this press conference were the results of long-awaited scientific testing.
Agati: Today we want to announce results of new radio-isotope testing that has been conducted on the bones, the teeth, and the hair of our four unidentified persons. [CAMERA SHUTTER SOUNDS]
Moon Narrating: Radio-isotope testing: it’s a scientific process usually reserved for geologists. Many of the reporters in the room that day, including me, struggled at first to understand it. But as we slowly came to realize, the technique can offer surprising details about a human life based on nothing more than the type of environment a person lived in.
And almost exactly three decades since the Bear Brook mystery began, it finally gave investigators their first lead.
[PHONE RINGS]
Jason Moon, On the Phone: Hi, this is Jason with New Hampshire Public Radio. How are you?
George Kamenov: Ugh, I’m getting sick. My, my son brought some kind of virus.
Moon: Oh, sorry to hear that. Did you get your flu shot?
Kamenov: I got it, but looks like it’s something else.
Moon: Uh oh.
Moon Narrating: When George Kamenov was studying to become a geologist, he never imagined he would one day use his training to solve murder cases. But then again, he says, all science is about solving mysteries.
Kamenov: What we do in geology is often like forensic chemistry. We’re trying to identify, let’s say, where this water comes from or what this water interacts with. It’s sort of like this is the same thing now, we’re just applying it to, to humans.
Moon Narrating: Kamenov, who’s with the University of Florida, analyzed the remains of the Bear Brook victims with a technique that relies on the science of isotopes.
Before we get into this, I want to point out just how important forensic science has been to the Bear Brook case. In the absence of witnesses or missing persons reports, the only information that detectives have been able to glean about the victims – what they look like and where they might be from – has come by way of pushing the boundaries of forensic science. Whether that’s cutting edge facial reconstruction or using a high-tech chemical analysis of the atoms from within the victims remains.
Ok, isotopes.
[MUSIC IN]
Moon Narrating: Isotopes are atoms with either too few or too many neutrons. Basically, they’re just different versions of the same element.
You’ve probably heard of radioactive isotopes. But there are also other less-dramatic isotopes that can be really useful for scientists.
A handful of isotopes that are stable and naturally occuring are known as environmental isotopes. And geologists like Kamenov like them because they can be linked to geographic regions.
Kamenov: They can be used sort of like an inorganic DNA tracer. They can tell you about geographical place of origin.
Moon Narrating: Take oxygen-18. It's an isotope that is heavier than your standard oxygen atom. When rain clouds move from over water to over land, the water with oxygen-18 in it is the first to fall out as rain. That means that areas near the coast end up with more oxygen-18 than areas further inland.
So, a geologist can look at the amount of oxygen-18 in, say, a rock sample and get a clue about the type of environment the rock was formed in. But environmental isotopes aren’t found only in rocks.
Plants and animals also absorb environmental isotopes through their diet. So, an animal who lived in a region with lots of oxygen-18 will have more of it stored in their bones than an animal who lived elsewhere.
In other words, living things carry an imprint of their environment, recorded in isotopes.
[MUSIC UP AND OUT]
Scientists first started using the technique on human remains in archaeology – think ancient burials. That’s how Kamenov first started doing this.
Kamenov: ‘Cause you can do isotope analysis and you can figure out where these people were from and then you can use that for, uh, ancient human migrations and things like that.
Moon Narrating: Then one day, in 2012, one of Kamenov’s colleagues, a forensic anthropologist, came to him with a question.
Kamenov: She came one day into my office and she asked me if we could apply the same technique to modern cold cases and I said, “Well, let’s try and see what’s gonna happen.”
[MUSIC IN]
Moon Narrating: It didn’t take long to see they were on to something. The first case Kamenov looked into involved the remains of a woman found murdered in Florida in 1971.
Kamenov: All the leads were exhausted and they could not identify her. And now basically 40-some years later, we can show why that was the case, basically, because she was not local. She was a foreigner, most likely from Europe. And that’s how basically we started. We tried with one cold case and then we started working on other cold cases.
[MUSIC POST]
Moon Narrating: Kamenov is quick to point out that isotope testing alone can’t identify individual victims, but it can give you some broad clues about where to take an investigation. In the Florida cold case, it told investigators they should be looking through missing persons reports from a totally different continent. As one researcher put it, isotope testing doesn’t find the needle in the haystack, it shrinks the haystack down to a manageable size.
With the Bear Brook victims, given what little we knew about them, the haystack was essentially the entire globe. They could have been from anywhere.
[MUSIC OUT]
Moon Narrating: But by looking at four isotopes in the bones, teeth, and hair of the victims, Kamenov was able to narrow down the possibilities.
One of those isotopes came from a source you’d never expect.
Kamenov: The main reason that works is because for many, many years we used leaded gasoline.
[MUSIC IN]
Moon Narrating: That’s right. One of the first real clues about where the Bear Brook victims came from is thanks to leaded gasoline. Here’s how.
From the 1920s until it started getting phased out in the 1970s, cars all over the world were using leaded gasoline – basically spraying lead all over the environment.
Kamenov: So, wherever you go, let’s say you take a soil sample pretty much anywhere in the world, it still will contain tiny amounts of this, uh, lead.
Moon Narrating: But not all of the lead used in gasoline was the same. In America, the lead came from one mine in Mississippi. And in Europe, the lead came from a different mine in Australia.
[MUSIC POST]
The two different lead mines have different ratios of lead isotopes, making it easy for a scientist like Kamenov to tell them apart. And meanwhile, we are absorbing small amounts of the leftover lead in the environment into our bodies over the course of our lives.
Kamenov: So, we as live, let’s say you live in New Hampshire, you go around, you drink the water, you eat the food. So, tiny amounts of this lead that’s in the soil gets recorded in our bodies.
Moon Narrating: So, basically anyone who lives in North America has lead in their bodies with one isotopic signature, while Europeans have lead with a different isotopic signature in their bodies. This is how Kamenov was able to tell the victim in his first case was European. And this is how we know the Bear Brook victims are from North America.
Ok, not the biggest reveal. But a start.
After lead, other isotopes helped Kamenov narrow down the area even further.
Strontium and carbon isotopes, which hold clues about someone’s diet, helped eliminate Canada and Mexico as possibilities. Oxygen isotopes shed light on the water they drank, giving hints about how far from the coast they lived and how far north. It was here that Kamenov started to see something interesting, differences between the isotopic signatures of the victims.
[MUSIC OUT]
Kamenov: What we saw was that the three victims that are related by DNA, they kind of have the same oxygen isotopic signal, which tells us that they were all living together. But then, the fourth girl that was not related, she, uh, shows distinct oxygen isotopes, which tells us that she came from somewhere else.
[MUSIC UP AND OUT]
Moon Narrating: Back at the press conference, this was summed up for reporters in two color-coded maps.
Agati, At Press Conference: The specific areas highlighted in green behind me are the areas in the United States where the adult and the oldest and the youngest child were both raised in and were living in at the time of their death. [FADE UNDER]
Moon Narrating: The map for the related victims includes a swath that covers all of New England and stretches down as far as West Virginia.
Agati: So, you can see the area here on the Eastern Seaboard. Any of the green is a possibility.
Moon Narrating: It also includes parts of the upper Midwest and West Coast. The second map, for the unrelated child, highlights four very specific areas in the Northeast. Two different regions in Upstate New York, one on the border between northern Vermont and New Hampshire, and one in northern Maine.
Agati: She spent most of her childhood further inland, and mostly likely further North. [FADE UNDER]
Moon Narrating: Her map also includes different sections of the Midwest and West Coast than the other victims. But notably, her map does not include the area directly around Bear Brook State Park, which means, according to the isotope results, she was not from the immediate area.
[MUSIC IN]
Moon Narrating: I’d like to pause for a moment here to think about what exactly this means. Kamenov had reduced the global haystack to areas within the U.S. equivalent in size to a handful of states.
If this was the starting point of the Bear Brook investigation, it probably wouldn’t have seemed like a lead at all. The areas highlighted on this map, they are home to millions of people. But if you’ve been watching this case gather dust, wondering how on Earth four people could disappear so completely from the world without anybody noticing, this map is the first new piece of information in 30 years.
It wasn’t a slam dunk. Not even close. But it told investigators where to focus their efforts. And there was one more thing that Kamenov was able to find. A tantalizing clue about how the victims spent the last few weeks of their lives.
[MUSIC UP AND OUT]
Moon Narrating: Isotope testing can tell us a lot about where someone lived, thanks to regional variations of isotopes and human pollution. But while the isotopes themselves are important, scientists can also learn a lot from where the isotopes are found within the body.
For instance, your teeth. The isotopes there only reflect the environment from your early life, since teeth stop forming by your mid-20s. That means the isotopic signature of your childhood environment is forever locked in your enamel, even if you spend the rest of your life somewhere else.
Isotopes found in hair, on the other hand, tell a different story.
[MUSIC IN]
Because hair grows continuously, it provides a record of the recent past. Each strand of hair is like a timeline of the final months of someone’s life. How far the timeline goes back depends on the length of the hair.
And because hair grows pretty quickly, it records changes in someone’s environment with a surprising level of detail.
In a case from Seattle, isotopes from an unidentified victim’s hair showed she had been moving back and forth from two regions several times in the last few months before her death. That information helped police match her to a missing persons report and ultimately to identify her.
[MUSIC POST]
Moon Narrating: The hair of the adult victim in the Bear Brook case offered a similar clue about her movements just before the murder.
Kamenov: Her hair showed that the last few months before death, she was living in the area. However, about five to seven months before death, she went somewhere, either to the North or to the West, to, like, a colder climate where the oxygen isotopes are lower. And what’s interesting is that the unrelated victim, the fourth girl that is not related by DNA, her teeth also show these lighter oxygen isotopes. So, one possible interpretation is that that’s the time when the non-related girl joined the group.
[MUSIC UP AND OUT]
Moon Narrating: While the isotope maps for the related victims and the non-related child showed they grew up in different areas, testing of their hair showed that all four victims were together for the last two weeks to three months of lives, most likely in New England.
So, what happened? Where did the adult victim go six months before she died? Was that when the non-related child joined the family? Was it an adoption? A kidnapping? Where is the non-related child’s family?
After that press conference in 2015, I’d asked Benjamin Agati, the prosecutor assigned to the Cold Case Unit, how they would try to answer those questions. Now that they’d inched the case forward with the isotope testing, what was next? What else could they do?
Agati: Somebody told me the other day, uh, that they saw the photos on the news and said, “Wow, the adult female, the victim, she looks like somebody back in high school.” They went to their old yearbook and looked. They were completely wrong. It wasn’t that person. But the fact that they thought to go look, tells me we’ve got something going down the right road. And so, even something like that, if somebody says, “I’m not too sure.” Pull out your yearbook. Look up that old friend or person that you knew and see if they are there. Take a look. Is it a possibility that this is a match? Give us a call. Let us do the work.
[VERY LOW CREEPY TONE IN]
Moon Narrating: This theory of how the case would be solved seemed totally reasonable to me at the time. Remember, this was the first time I had ever even heard about the Bear Brook murders.
But looking back, it must have been hard, calling that press conference, explaining how years of work had resulted in two simple maps and a set of images, putting that information out into the world, and then just hoping for a tip. Nothing useful had come in before. I wonder if they really thought anything would be different this time.
Agati, At Press Conference: We’re encouraging everybody to reach out to us through those contacts, and the people who have been involved in this case, they have been great. They have done that and given that information to the Cold Case Unit, given it to NCMEC and we’re following up on it it as fast as we can… Alright , if there are no further questions, I do have handouts for anybody who wants them and they contain the entire presentation.
[SOUND OF PEOPLE TALKING, LEAVING PRESS CONFERENCE UP AND OUT, LOW CREEPY TONE GETS LOUDER]
Moon Narrating: Since we spoke in 2015, Agati has been reassigned out of the Cold Case Unit. But I imagine he still thinks about the Bear Brook case, frustrated that the victims, even now, remain unidentified.
In that sense, all of his work, and the work of investigators at NCMEC, was for nought. The new composite images and the maps went out on the news and people called in, but they mostly gave the same tips investigators had already ruled out. If there is an old yearbook out there somewhere with a photo of one of the Bear Brook victims, it’s probably still sitting in a closet, or tucked under a bed.
The release of the isotope testing results was in some ways the final Hail Mary in the Bear Brook case. The Bear Brook investigation was reaching the end of the line.
But meanwhile, another mystery thousands of miles away in California was just beginning to unravel. This case had also stumped police for decades, and it would also push the boundaries of forensic science. And by the end, it would lead all the way back to New Hampshire.
Elaine Ramos, On the Phone: The minute I met him… I… it was… it was like meeting the devil.
Moon, On the Phone: Have you ever felt that way about anybody else?
Ramos, On the Phone: Never. Never in my life have I ever, ever, ever had the hairs on the back of my neck stand up when I met somebody.
[LOW CREEPY TONE GROWS INTO RUMBLING SOUND, UP AND OUT]
Moon Narrating: That’s next time on Bear Brook.
[THEME MUSIC IN]
Moon Narrating: If you have any information about the Bear Brook murders, or if you think you recognize any of the victims, contact the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at 1-800-THE-LOST. That’s 1-800-843-5678.
You can see the latest composite images of the victims and the isotope maps released in 2015 at our website bearbrookpodcast.com.
Bear Brook is reported and produced by me, Jason Moon.
Taylor Quimby is Senior Producer.
Editing help from Cori Princell, Todd Bookman, Lauren Chooljian, Sam Evans-Brown, Britta Green, and Annie Ropeik.
The Executive Producer is Erika Janik.
Dan Barrick is NHPR’s News Director.
Director of Content is Maureen McMurray.
NHPR’s Digital Director is Rebecca Lavoie.
Photography and video by Allie Gutierrez.
Graphics and interactives by Sara Plourde.
Original music for this show was composed by me, Jason Moon, and Taylor Quimby.
Additional music in this episode from Blue Dot Sessions.
Bear Brook is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.
[THEME MUSIC UP AND OUT]
Transcript of S1 Episode 2: Known Only To God
[NATURE SOUNDS - WIND BLOWING, BIRDS CHIRPING]
Jason Moon, Narrating: For 15 years, the second barrel was sitting just 300 feet away from where the first barrel was found in the woods of Allenstown, New Hampshire.
It was 300 feet away when the Morgans’ son, Jesse and his friends pushed over the first barrel in the summer of 1985. It was there later that year when a hunter saw the bodies and called the police. It was there, 100 yards away, as detectives searched in vain for clues about the first two victims. And it was there when detectives left, when the case went cold and people started to forget.
[MUSIC IN, NATURE SOUNDS CONTINUE]
Moon, Narrating: It sat there, as Jesse Morgan grew up and left the trailer park for college. As Ron Montplaisir, the officer who first found the barrel, neared his retirement. It sat there through 15 New Hampshire winters, the blue paint slowly turning brown with rust. It sat there until State Trooper John Cody spotted it late one spring afternoon, as dusk was settling in.
John Cody: The first thing going through my mind is, “Do we have a dump site here? Is somebody using this area to, to dump, um, the bodies of people they’ve, uh, killed?” And… And I was kind of like, “No, no. This is New Hampshire. We don’t expect this stuff.”
Moon, Narrating: For people like Anne and Kevin Morgan, who lived on the edge of the park, it was startling to think that police had missed something so important.
Kevin Morgan: I mean, it’s hard to believe, isn’t it?
Ann Morgan: I was mortified that it had been there that long.
Kevin Morgan: I, I mean, what does that tell you about the investigation? Really, I mean… It says something about the investigation. There basically was none!
[MUSIC POST]
Ann Morgan: Fifteen years. Fifteen years!
Kevin Morgan: Why wasn’t that barrel found?
[MUSIC POST]
Moon, Narrating: This is Bear Brook. I’m Jason Moon.
[MUSIC UP AND OUT, NATURE SOUNDS FADE OUT]
Moon, Narrating: Before we talk about what happened after the second set of bodies were found, we’re going to spend some time trying to answer that uncomfortable question. Why did it take so long to find?
The second barrel has always been an awkward topic for police in New Hampshire. They know the fact that it took them 15 years to find it doesn’t look good.
Here’s Ron Montplaisir, the officer who found the first barrel in 1985.
Ron Montplaisir: Um… I, I kinda said, “Jeez! Uh, ya know, I set up the perimeter! I, I guess I didn’t set it up…” Kind of… kind of slapped myself saying, “Wow, why, why didn’t we do a bigger perimeter?” But we were just focused on, ya know, that first barrel. I mean, you have to understand that this is a wooded area, this is a very thick forest, and there was a lot of clutter, and, um, it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, ya know? [COUGHS] Who would think, ya know?
Moon, Narrating: In case you’re wondering, investigators today are confident both barrels were there in 1985.
But it’s not just Montplaisir who argues that finding the second barrel was easier said than done. Authorities at the state level who are in charge of the case today will say pretty much the same thing. This came up at a press conference a few years ago, when a reporter with the state’s largest newspaper put the question to Benjamin Agati, a prosecutor with the New Hampshire attorney general’s office.
Mark Hayward: It took 15 years to find the second oil drum.
Benjamin Agati: Mhmm.
Hayward: Um… What happened there? It was only 300 feet away. Was it buried or was it hidden or was it just overlooked? It doesn’t seem like it was that far away.
Agati: Well, I think if we were talking about an area that had more of, let’s say, bike trails, where it was more marked, then I could certainly see your point on that. But with regards to this, it was 300 feet away. Um, we’re also talking about an area that’s just heavily wooded and uh, and quite frankly, I don’t think that finding that second barrel sooner would change the information that we have to present today.
[MUSIC IN]
Moon, Narrating: So, either the barrel was only 300 feet away, or it was 300 feet away. As you can hear, your opinion on this is open to interpretation.
Taylor Quimby: And uh…
Jason Moon: Ok, so you’re barrel one.
Quimby: Ok, I’m barrel one.
Moon: And you’re found… [FADE UNDER]
Moon, Narrating: It is hard to imagine what 300 feet looks like. So, producer Taylor Quimby and I went to a local high school football field to get a better idea. Taylor stood at one goal line, while I walked across the length of the football field to the other.
[MUSIC IN]
Moon, Shouting: Can you hear me?!
Quimby, Calling from a Distance: Just barely!
Jason Moon, To Himself: Just barely.
Quimby, Calling from a Distance: I can definitely see you!
[MUSIC UP AND OUT]
Moon, Narrating: At this point, 300 feet was feeling like an absurdly short distance for someone to have missed the second barrel. But of course, the barrels weren’t found in an open field with clear lines of sight. They were found in the woods.
[FADE UP NATURE SOUNDS]
Quimby: This will be a good test because we’re both wearing very brightly colored flannel.
Moon: Yeah. [LAUGHS]
Moon, Narrating: I paced out the same number of steps in the woods, with Taylor again staying behind to mark the location of the first barrel.
Moon: [SOUND OF FOOTSTEPS IN LEAVES] One, two, three, four, five, six, seven... 98. Whew… Okay, turning around and… I cannot see Taylor at all.
Moon, Narrating: In the woods, with trees and brush and boulders in between, 300 feet seemed to mean something different than it did on the football field.
Quimby, Calling from a Distance: Shout if you see me moving!
Moon, Narrating: Even when we tried to find our way back to each other, it took a while just to figure where that was.
Moon: I’m at the top of the hill now. Can you see me?
Quimby, From a Distance: I… I… I’m not sure! I can’t see you. Can you see me?
Moon, Calling Out: Nope!
[SOUND OF FOOTSTEPS IN LEAVES]
Quimby, Closer: Where the hell are you? I thought your shirt was – ope! There you are.
Moon: That’s a… a bit different.
Quimby: Yeah, that is.
Moon: It, um… I think… yeah. In terms of, like, how far would I search? I’m now thinking, like, I would never go that far. You know what I mean? Like, if, if I take that distance and, like, imagine, like, the radius, circling it around in every direction from the crime scene? You know, that’s huge. That’s a lot of like…
[MUSIC FADES IN]
Quimby: Well, you can’t do it one person.
Moon: That’s true.
Quimby: ‘C-cause I, I disagree. Like, I, I think… I would like to think that if you found two bodies in a barrel…
Moon: Hmm.
Quimbly: …anywhere, you would do at least that much. But, I, I’m picturing a team of people and maybe some dogs, ya know? Like…
Moon: Yeah.
Quimby: I’m picturing this… like, “Prison Break” scene [MOON LAUGHS] where you got a whole bunch of people combing through fields and forests and what have you… [FADES OUT]
[MUSIC UP AND OUT]
Moon, Narrating: So, it’s definitely much harder to find something 300 feet away in the woods, even when that thing is shouting at you.
But clearly the barrel wasn’t impossible to find. And in the end, it was a single investigator on his first trip to the crime scene who found it.
Which brings us back to the same question… Why didn’t they find it in 1985 with the other barrel? Why weren’t there large teams of investigators walking shoulder to shoulder through the woods after the first barrel was found? Why wasn’t it more like that “Prison Break” scene Taylor was imagining?
One explanation – maybe you’d call it an excuse – is that the Allenstown PD was just a small town police force, with few officers and few resources. Remember, they were deputizing local residents just to secure the area.
But then, state police didn’t find it either. And they were the ones ultimately in charge of the investigation.
In either case, there’s a big reason why investigators may have felt in over their heads. Just before the first bodies were found in Bear Brook, there was another murder just a few miles away.
[MUSIC IN]
Moon: Uh, let’s just go through the whole case. Where do you want to – What’s the best place to start?
Kevin Flynn: Yeah, so I guess we start on November 9th, 1985.
Moon, Narrating: Kevin Flynn is a true crime author and a longtime reporter in New Hampshire.
Flynn: Danny Paquette was a welder who lived in Hooksett, New Hampshire. He was working in his backyard welding a bulldozer and two of his friends were in his garage, repairing and restoring a car. And they heard a noise. They came out, they found Danny lying on the ground. They thought that he had electrocuted himself with the arc welder. But he was bleeding from the chest.
Moon, Narrating: Danny Paquette had been shot and killed. It wasn’t exactly clear from where or by whom, but the only explanation seemed to be that the bullet came from the woods near his house.
When state police first arrived at the scene, they wondered if Danny Paquette had died in a hunting accident. But they couldn’t be sure, so a homicide investigation was opened. That was Saturday. On Sunday, the first barrel in the Bear Brook case was discovered.
[MUSIC UP AND OUT]
Moon, Narrating: New Hampshire averages only about 15 murders a year, so starting two cases on the same weekend put a real strain on state police. Some of the detectives who started on the Paquette case were called off the next day to go work the Bear Brook murders.
It was the beginning of two parallel investigations. Two separate mysteries that would end up influencing each other for decades to come.
In Allenstown, officers began by interviewing people in town, but no one seemed to know anything.
In Hooksett, people seemed to know a lot. Investigators quickly realized that if Danny Paquette’s death was a homicide, there would be no shortage of plausible suspects.
Flynn: Danny was a really interesting character because there were a lot of folks who had reason to, ya know, want to hurt him. He was a ladies man. He had a black book that was filled with the names of girlfriends and wives of people in town.
Moon, Narrating: On the Bear Brook case, detectives were going through stacks of missing persons reports, still just trying to identify the victims.
On the Paquette case, police had the victim’s ID and a half a dozen people who might have a grudge against him. They had plausible theories and potential evidence. Lots of potential evidence.
Flynn: One of the weirdest details was… In their investigation, they had found out that somebody had been in a hot air balloon…
[MUSIC IN]
Flynn: …and was videotaping the scenery and went right over Danny’s house, you know, about the time of the shooting. I saw the videotape, there’s nothin’, there was nothing on it, but it’s just like, could this get any weirder?
Moon, Narrating: The hot air balloon camcorder tape would turn out to be a giant waste of time. But at least in the Paquette case, there was stuff like this to sift through. It had momentum, where the Bear Brook investigation was spinning its wheels. So, maybe it makes sense then that, according to Flynn, the Paquette investigation ended up receiving more attention from state police.
Flynn: Probably the best detective of that era on the state police was a guy by the name of Roland Lamy and he was on this case along with John Barthelmes, who is the current commissioner of safety. Those were the two sharpest guys and they were over in Hooksett – they weren’t over in Allenstown.
[MUSIC UP AND OUT]
Moon, Narrating: Meanwhile the two cases weren’t just dividing the attention of state police, they were also creating false leads for each other.
Flynn: There aren’t so many homicides in New Hampshire. And when you have two on the same weekend, a relatively short distance apart, you gotta at least think, “Well, I dunno, could this somehow have one thing to do with the other?
Moon, Narrating: It wasn’t a totally crazy idea. A mysterious shooting and discovering two bodies in a blue barrel on the same weekend only a few miles apart – it was a coincidence that couldn't be ignored.
But in the end it was just a coincidence and another dead end that detectives found themselves in.
Eventually, after enough of these dead ends, both cases ground to a halt. In the Bear Brook investigation, detectives felt there was nothing else they could try. In the Paquette case, investigators just decided their initial hunch was right.
[MUSIC IN]
Moon, Narrating: It was a hunting accident. No arrests. Just a stray bullet. Case closed.
[MUSIC POST]
Moon, Narrating: For months, the Bear Brook and Paquette investigations had fought over resources. And who knows how things might have gone differently if that hadn’t been the case. But ironically, the same case that distracted investigators from Bear Brook, would later give them hope that it could be solved. That’s because in 1999, 14 years later, the Paquette investigation was reopened. It wasn’t a hunting accident, after all. Danny Paquette was murdered.
The case was solved by a private investigator. He had been hired by the Hooksett police chief, who didn’t have the manpower to assign one of his own detectives to work a cold case full time.
That private investigator found a hole in the alibi of Danny Paquette’s teenage step-daughter and a friend of hers from school. That revelation ultimately led to a confession – and a conviction.
[THEME MUSIC IN]
Flynn: And I think that, you know, after the, the Hooksett case, after the Paquette case, you know, there was really a feeling that, yeah, you know, we – this could be done if the resources were set aside.
Moon: Mhmm. Is this the biggest, most famous cold case in New Hampshire, the Paquette case, you think?
Flynn: I think up until yours. [MOON LAUGHS]
[THEME MUSIC UP AND FADE OUT]
Moon, Narrating: Before I started reporting this story, it had never really occurred to me just how hard it is to solve a murder when you don’t know who the victim is.
That might sound obvious, but I think it’s easy to underestimate just how much of a hurdle it is to finding a suspect. When you don’t know the victim, there’s no motive. There are no neighbors to talk to. No friends, no enemies, no disgruntled exes.
There’s a line from a local news article written about the Bear Brook case that reads, “Police hope to solve the mystery in three steps. Learn where they’re from, discover who they are, and then, find the killer.”
When State Trooper John Cody found the second barrel in 2000, police were 15 years into the case, and still very much at step one.
Cody: I ended up seeing this, um, plastic, and I peeled it back, and then, I saw, um, what appeared to me to be a bone, and of course, you’re trying to talk yourself out of it, saying, “There’s no way this is happening.”
Moon, Narrating: On that day, after he peered into the second barrel with his flashlight, Cody immediately called his superiors. And at first, they didn’t really believe him.
Cody: You know, I think it was probably one of those things where they figured, you know, it’s close to the weekend. They’ll come out, they’ll take a look, they know it’s not what I thought it was [MOON LAUGHS] and they’ll be on their way home. But it just didn’t turn out like that.
Moon, Narrating: Instead, officers found the remains of two young girls in the second barrel. One was about 3 years old, the other only about 2. The remains were skeletal and wrapped in some sort of plastic. Like the other victims, they were killed by blunt force trauma to the head.
This put the total number of victims in the Bear Brook case to four, a woman and three kids. Their estimated ages… late 20’s for the adult, 9 for the oldest child, 3 for the middle child, and 2 for the youngest child. The adult and the oldest child were found in the first barrel. The two youngest in the second barrel.
Cody: It became apparent. I mean, we’re talking about, how does… an entire family… just go missing?
[MUSIC IN]
Moon, Narrating: Several years later, DNA testing of the remains would sketch the rough outline of a family. The results showed the adult female is maternally related to the oldest and youngest children. Most likely their mother, though it’s possible she’s a cousin or a sister.
But interestingly, those DNA tests showed no relationship between the middle child and any of the other victims. Investigators have speculated that she might have been a step-child or an adoption.
[MUSIC POST]
Moon, Narrating: Back in 2000, after State Trooper John Cody discovered the second barrel, he and other investigators went back over everything they knew about the case.
They re-interviewed people in town, entertained new theories, and searched again through national databases of missing persons.
Investigators hoped the second barrel would be the key. That one of the new victims would be matched to a missing persons report, an identity, then a timeline, a list of possible suspects, finally a motive. They hoped it would become like a normal homicide investigation.
Instead it was a tedious case of deja-vu. Investigators in 2000 combed through the same information as detectives in 1985 had with the same disappointing results.
Cody: Couple, ya know, couple little specks here and there, which would lead to a couple of other things, but it was sorta like getting lost in the city and you take a right, you take a left, and you end up on dead end streets or alleyways, um, at every turn and that’s pretty much where this case goes.
Moon: Did you guys ever get as far as to have any suspects?
Cody: No. Not even close. No.
[MUSIC UP AND OUT]
Moon, Narrating: As important as Cody’s discovery of the second barrel was, in the end it did little to move the case forward. If anything, it was like the case was moving backwards, getting worse as time went on. In 1985, there were two bodies in a barrel and no leads. Fifteen years later, all investigators had to show for their efforts were four bodies in two barrels with no leads.
But that didn’t mean that people gave up on the case. In fact the daunting nature of the challenge even attracted new people. While the official investigation into the Bear Brook murders remained pretty much static, an amateur investigator named Ronda Randall picked up the case.
Ronda Randall: Certainly there’s a lot of people looking for people in this country, for one reason or another.
Moon, Narrating: Ronda is someone who knows how to find someone. By day, she’s a social worker. In the rest of her time, she’s a genealogist, who specializes in adoption searches – that’s reuniting adopted people with their biological parents.
Randall: Um, well, in the 80’s when I first started doing it, I didn’t have a personal computer at home. It was a lot of phone calls. I mean, there was a time when my phone bill for a month ran at about $1,100 and my husband was like, “I don’t know about this hobby,” you know?
Moon, Narrating: I first met Ronda through her blog, Oakhill Research. It chronicles the history of the Bear Book murders and her own efforts, since 2011, to identify the victims.
I should mention two things here. First, Ronda isn’t really the true-crime type. She wasn’t interested in criminology before this case. She wasn’t binge watching episodes of “Forensic Files.” In fact, she doesn’t really watch TV.
Second, she grew up in New Hampshire but didn’t hear about the murders until later in life after she had moved to a town in Maine, about two hours from Allenstown. She says she really only became interested in the Bear Brook case after the internet came around and online messaging boards starting making adoption searches too easy.
Randall: I think right around the time my kids left home I was looking for something a little bit different, but still in a genealogy and research world and had come across the story of the Allenstown victims and being unfamiliar with it I – and a genealogist – I thought, “Surely, we can turn up some identities for these folks,” and that’s really where it began.
Later, Ronda would tell me she had a 2-year-old niece who died of leukemia not long before she started on the Bear Brook case. Now, she wonders if that may have had something to do with how she felt about the mystery.
Randall: I just thought of the process that our family went through in fighting to keep her alive and then grieving her death and, and then to think of a little child about her age who nobody seems to be coming forward for. And you know, I’ve looked back sometimes and wondered if the case struck me so hard because I saw those little unidentified children, you know, and felt like, “Who’s mourning for them?”
[MUSIC IN]
Moon, Narrating: The way Ronda looked at it, this wouldn’t be all that different from an adoption search. Over the years, Ronda says she has identified upwards of 150 people using public records, a phone, and a lot of hard work. In this case, the only difference was that the people she wanted to identity were murder victims.
So, Ronda got to work. I don’t think Ronda would disagree if I said she can get a little obsessive about her research projects. The first time we spoke on the phone, she told me she’s just well suited for it. She doesn’t mind doing the kind of grinding, monotonous research that most people hate.
Randall: One time I went to the New Hampshire State Library and I read the Concord 1984 phonebook. Every name, every page. It took me 14 hours. It took 2 days. And I was motion sick by the end of every day. Like, severely motion sick.
[MUSIC POST]
Randall: I, I’ve been called, whether it’s a compliment or not, a pitbull. [LAUGHS] That kind of thing. I tend to be tenacious. I sink my teeth into something and I don’t let go.
[MUST POST]
Moon, Narrating: Ronda began her research on the Bear Brook case with her usual level of dogged interest. But it became something more than just a research project in the summer of 2011. That’s when she decided she needed to see the area where the barrels were found in person.
Randall: It was Memorial Day weekend of 2011. I enlisted one of my brothers, Scott Maxwell – he lives in New Hampshire – to accompany me. And we kind of just figured we’d go out to the area and talk to some neighbors and just learn a little bit more about it. But it was that trip that day out there that really, um, kind of sparked an obsessive interest in the research on this case.
[SOUND OF FOOTSTEPS IN LEAVES]
Moon, Narrating: I wanted to see what Ronda and her brother Scott saw that day when they first visited the area where the bodies were found. So, one day, we parked on the shoulder of a winding road in Allenstown and then set off into the woods.
Moon: It’s beautiful out here.
Randall: It really is. It’s kind of an interesting juxtaposition of a terribly morbid event in a beautiful setting.
Moon, Narrating: It was December 2015 and I can remember my hand was freezing from holding the mic. But I was also riveted. It was my first trip out here, just a few weeks after I first learned about the case.
Randall: You know, the first time I came I think it just had a really profound impact on me. There was kind of a hush out here and I felt… like there was a spirit, and kind of a sacred feel to where they were found.
[FOOTSTEPS]
Moon, Narrating: Ronda and Scott led me down a snowmobile trail toward the site of the first barrel. They had pieced together the approximate location based on interviews with retired Allenstown cops like Ron Montplaisir and his former chief, as well as residents of the trailer park like Kevin Morgan who was deputized to keep the press away from the site.
The snowmobile trail led down a slight incline. All around us, the forest floor was covered in a thick blanket of leaves. Only a few boulders peaked through here and there.
[FOOTSTEPS, LEAVES RUSTLING]
Then, suddenly, we had arrived.
Randall: And by all accounts, it was about 20 feet off to the left from this area. So, I’m not sure, in this little strip, was it here or there, but…
[MUSIC IN]
Moon, Narrating: I was struck by just how quickly we reached the spot.
[NATURE SOUNDS - BIRDS CHIRPING, WIND BLOWING]
Moon, Narrating: We had set out from the side of a road along the northern edge of the state park. From there it had taken us less than five minutes to reach the site of the first barrel. Bear Brook State Park may be vast and unknowable, but from where the first barrel was found, you can look back toward the road, and catch glimpses of passing cars.
[SOUND OF CARS DRIVING]
Moon, Narrating: On top of that, I learn, we’re not even technically in Bear Brook State Park. The victims in the case commonly known as “the Bear Brook murders” weren’t actually found in Bear Brook State Park. They were found on a narrow lot of private property that sits in between the trailer park and the state park.
The lot is small – not even a tenth of a square mile. On a map, it looks like a little rectangular bite taken out of the top of Bear Brook State Park.
[CAR DRIVING SOUNDS FADE OUT]
Moon, Narrating: The private lot is owned by a guy named Ed Gallagher. In the early 1980s, he also owned and ran a small camp store on the property. It was called the Bear Brook Store. People camping in Bear Brook State Park could stop in for a couple bags of ice or a case of beer. And people who lived in the nearby trailer park could walk here for a gallon of milk.
Randall: So, right over there, this dip is where the foundation of the store was and where, you know, there was an apartment above it that the property owner lived in… [FADE OUT]
Moon, Narrating: The Bear Brook store burned down in 1983, just two years before the first barrel was found. Today, there’s almost no sign of the old store unless you know what to look for. A foundation that’s mostly overgrown. An old disconnected power pole standing in the woods.
Ronda’s brother Scott says the fact that the barrels were found so near the site of the former store, on private property, was one of the things that caught his interest on that first trip out here.
Scott Maxwell: You, You’ve got hundreds of acres of state park and, and old logging roads that go in, and why you would choose to come in past a, uh, burned out building, so close to a trailer park to dump the bodies when you had all that area where you could, you know, no fear of anybody seeing you.
Moon, Narrating: It changed how I thought about the case, too. Before, in the version of the story where the barrels were found deep in the forest, the mystery of the Bear Brook murders seemed impenetrable… like a maze.
But standing in the spot where the bodies were actually found, in this place where people used to come and go, I found myself thinking… there must be something that someone remembers, even if they don’t realize it. A name, or a face, or a family that came through the park years ago – some clue that could begin to unravel the case after all these years.
On their first trip here in 2011, Scott and Ronda also knocked on a few doors in the Bear Brook Gardens trailer park and found another surprising detail. Many people who had vivid memories of when the first barrel was found told them they had never even heard about the second barrel.
Randall: Um, you know, there were times when I almost felt like we were arguing with people. “No, really, there were a second set of bodies found.” And they’d be like, “Well, I’ve lived here 32 years, I think I’d know.”
Moon, Narrating: They figured that if there were longtime residents of the trailer park who had never even been told about the second barrel, maybe someone who used to live there knew something and just hadn’t been asked the right question.
So, Ronda and Scott decided to embark on a massive project to track down every single person who lived in the Bear Brook Gardens trailer park from 1977 to 1985.
[MUSIC IN]
A few weeks after we visited the area where the barrels were found, I took a trip up to Ronda’s home in Maine, about two hours northeast of Bear Brook. I wanted to get a better sense of the scale of their project and what they’d been able to find. It didn’t take long to see they’d collected an overwhelming amount of information about the case.
Randall: Because we never knew where it would go, we were never prepared for what happens when you have 5,000 pages of interviews and information and how best to organize it. That’s still a work in progress, but…
Moon, Narrating: Hanging on the wall in the dining room of Ronda’s home is a huge aerial photo of the Bear Brook Gardens trailer park. It’s the sort of thing you’d expect to see in an episode of a police procedural… like those cork boards with strands of yarn connecting all the evidence. The photo is maybe 6 feet across, 4 feet high. It’s black and white, taken sometime in the late ‘80s. In the photo you can make out each lot in the trailer park. Ronda and Scott have them labeled with the names of the families and the years that they lived there.
Randall: You know, we found that 1979 a George Moore lived there, 1980 Patrick and Alice Moore, and so forth, and so we would plug them in for the years we knew they lived there… [FADE UNDER]
Moon, Narrating: I like to imagine Ronda staring at the map over her breakfast, or maybe pacing in front of it after dark. The excitement of discovering another name, of coming that much closer to tracking them all down.
But Ronda and Scott have been more than armchair investigators on this case. They’ve done a lot of hands-on detective work, too – something police generally discourage.
When it comes to Ronda and Scott and the New Hampshire State Police, they actually enjoy a pretty good relationship. I think detectives figured out early on they wouldn’t be able to talk Ronda out of researching the case. And for their part, Ronda and Scott, generally share whatever they find with state police… transcripts of phone calls, photos from the area where the bodies were found. More than a few times, state police have followed up on information they provided.
Over the past seven years since their first trip to Allenstown, Scott and Ronda’s work on the case has taken many shapes.
When they learned motorcycle gangs were active in the trailer park during the ‘80s, Ronda and Scott passed out flyers with info on the victims at the Laconia Bike Week, an annual event where hundreds of thousands bikers from around the country meet in New Hampshire.
There was the time they flew down to Florida to interview the retired Allenstown Police Chief who told them he never stopped thinking about the case.
They’ve made a number of trips back out to Allenstown, following up on things they’d heard from the former trailer park residents they were tracking down. Ronda shows me a plastic ziplock bag with something she found on one of those trips. A child’s white shoe.
Randall: You know, just in the leaves and dirt under a tree, you know… We see this shoe, an old school little child’s shoe. And I’m sure it couldn’t have lasted for 30 years out there probably, even though it is quite worn. But it still just, it was really ominous to see it. You know, I picked it up and put it in a bag and brought it home and you know, I sometimes wonder what it’s story is and hopefully, it had nothing to do with the victims but…
Moon, Narrating: I’d like to tell you that one of these trips led somewhere. I’d like to tell you that this shoe was the missing key that investigators needed. That it had a worn initial on the inside of the tongue, or some other small detail that would lead them to ID the Bear Brook victims. But of course, that wasn’t the case. Ronda and Scott gathered more information, but it was never the information they needed. The shoe wasn’t even found near where the barrels were. More than anything, it was a symbol of what drove Ronda. Still, she sent photos of the shoe to state police. It’s just the sort of thing she would do. Just in case.
All their time spent working on this has changed both Ronda and Scott’s lives.
Randall: This is my brother, who, you know, I probably spoke to once a year on the phone, prior to this, and now sometimes I speak to him like seven times a day, you know… [RANDALL LAUGHS]
Moon, Narrating: If you haven’t noticed, Scott doesn’t talk as much as Ronda. It’s just one of the ways they seem to balance each other out. Ronda is always ready to dive in, while Scott’s more measured. And somehow those contrasts seem to add to the bond they’ve formed over the case. A bond that can be hard for others to understand.
Randall: I, I think for a year or two, like, at family get-togethers, no one wanted to sit near us, you know, [RANDALL LAUGHS], ‘cause that’s all we talked about. [RANDALL LAUGHS]
Maxwell: Those that know us well know that we have OCD. [MAXWELL, RANDALL LAUGH]
Randall: Well, here’s a picture that might illustrate this a little bit. So, this is Scott’s wife… [FADE UNDER]
Moon, Narrating: Ronda reaches for a photo and hands it to me. It shows two people standing next to two different size barrels.
Randall: [FADES UP] Where would you cut to fit in barrels? So, yes, you know… [FADES UNDER]
[MUSIC IN]
Moon, Narrating: They were using them as stand-ins – in place of the corpses of the victims – so they could get a sense of how you might dismember them to fit inside.
Randall: …And what is that a 35?
Maxwell, Off Mic: Thirty-five.
Randall: ‘Cause we were trying to figure out. And you can tell they’re just like, “Oh, brother, here they go again!” [RANDALL LAUGHS] But, you know, we just… So, they’ve helped us along the way, but…
Maxwell, Off Mic: Not as enthusiastically.
Randall: Nope. Right, right.
Moon, Narrating: When I first spoke with Ronda, to be honest, I wasn’t sure what to make of her or this project. I mean, who reads the phone book for 14 hours? And could her research really be helpful or was it just getting in the way of the real investigation?
But the more I spent time with Ronda and Scott, the more I felt like they were playing an important role. They hadn’t solved the case, but they had done a lot.
They reunited a whole community of neighbors from Allenstown, some of whom didn’t even know about the second barrel, who are all now invested in solving the case.
They’ve collected a huge repository of information about the case on their blog – all the media coverage, all the theories that have been floated, the fruits of their own research. A lot of my own reporting for this series was built on the work that Ronda and Scott had already done.
But perhaps most importantly, they stepped into the role of victims’ advocate – something that would usually come from the victim’s family. Today, Ronda and Scott are as close to being the victim’s family as it gets in this case, pestering police to look into things, handing out flyers about the victims.
Since 2011, they have refused to let anyone forget about this case. Ronda and Scott kept the torch lit.
Randall: And some days I find myself a little… maybe even angry, thinking, you know, “What grandmother let this happen, or what neighbor, or what bus driver or, you know – I mean, Where were all of you?”
[MUSIC UP AND OUT]
Moon, Narrating: I understood Ronda and Scott a little better after I did something that they and others I’ve talked to also felt compelled to do at some point.
[SOUND OF CAR KEYS JINGLING, CAR DOOR SLAMMING]
Moon, Narrating: I paid a visit to where the first two victims were buried back in 1987.
Moon, Walking in the Cemetery: Okay, well, I’m in the cemetery. Um, there’s probably 1,000 gravestones here and… So, now, I just have to find it.
Moon, Narrating: The Saint Jean the Baptiste Cemetery in Allenstown is on a quiet road, lined with tall cypress trees. The headstones are neatly arranged into a grid. I started at one corner and began making my way up and down the rows… until finally.
Moon, In the Cemetery: [SOUND OF FAINT FOOTSTEPS] Oh my God, here it is… Wow… [FOOTSTEPS] So, this is tucked in almost the very back, almost the very back row of this cemetery. And it’s, um, it’s… got a rose on top of it, of the headstone. And it reads, “Here lies the mortal remains, known only to God, of a woman, age 23 to 33, and a girl child, aged 8 to 10. Their slain bodies were found on November 10, 1985 in Bear Brook State Park. May their–” And it’s really faded here at the bottom. “May their souls find peace in God’s loving care.” [LONG PAUSE, SOUND OF WIND BLOWING] It’s one thing to know it. It’s another to see, see this in person.
Moon, Narrating: Standing there by the grave, I tried to imagine what that day was like in 1987 when the woman and the oldest child were buried here.
And then, I tried to imagine the day their bodies were exhumed.
[THEME MUSIC IN]
Moon, Narrating: In the 15 years after the second barrel was found, investigators had failed to find a single solid lede in the Bear Brook murders. But, while they were checking databases, and wearing out shoe leather, a parallel investigation was taking place. One that required all four bodies to be held by the state medical examiner. This investigation is more like the high-tech ones you might see on a TV crime show, employing scientific techniques rarely used in criminal cases. And it was this investigation that led to the first break in the Bear Brook murders, 30 years after the first bodies were found.
Benjamin Agati: Um, I want to thank everybody for coming today. We have some new testing results that we want to share with, basically, the world.
[THEME MUSIC POST]
Moon, Narrating: That’s next time on Bear Brook.
[THEME MUSIC OUT]
[CREDITS MUSIC IN]
Moon, Narrating: Bear Brook is reported and produced by me, Jason Moon.
Taylor Quimby is Senior Producer.
Editing help from Cori Princell, Todd Bookman, Lauren Chooljian, Sam Evans-Brown, Britta Green, and Annie Ropeik.
The Executive Producer is Erika Janik.
Dan Barrick is NHPR’s News Director.
Director of Content is Maureen McMurray.
NHPR’s Digital Director is Rebecca Lavoie.
Photography and video by Allie Gutierrez.
Graphics and interactives by Sara Plourde.
Original music for this show was composed by me, Jason Moon, and Taylor Quimby.
Additional music in this episode from Blue Dot Sessions, and Lee Rosevere.
To see a video of some of the locations from the first two episodes, like Bear Brook State Park and the cemetery where the first two victims were buried, go to our website, bearbrookpodcast.org.
To learn more about the fascinating and complicated story behind the Danny Paquette murder, check out the book “Our Little Secret” by Kevin Flynn and Rebecca Lavoie.
Bear Brook is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.
[CREDITS MUSIC UP AND OUT]
Transcript of S1 Episode 1: Hide and Seek
Jason Moon, Narrating: You know those ‘80s movies where a bunch of kids wander the neighborhood on bicycles and then stumble into a mystery? This story starts kinda like that.
[‘80S MUSIC IN]
Jesse Morgan: Ya know, growin’ up, there was probably a good two- or three-dozen kids that lived in the park and we just roamed the place like we owned the place.
Moon, Narrating: That’s Jesse Morgan. In the movie version of this story, he’d probably be the leader of the group. The scrappy one. The Corey Feldman.
Morgan: The way that trailer parks work… I mean, there’s a lot of people that come in and go out. I mean, I was one of the few kids that moved in when I was 2 and moved out when I was 18.
[‘80S MUSIC FADES OUT]
Moon, Narrating: In the summer of 1985, Jesse was 11 years old. It was the year the Nintendo came to North America. New Coke hit the shelves and “Calvin and Hobbes” started running in newspapers. That year, Jesse and his friends came up with a game. It was basically hide and seek, except the seeker rode around on a four-wheeler.
[ENGINE REVVING SOUND]
Morgan: All the kids would hide, and the last one that got found would be able to ride the four-wheeler. Just do that over and over. And we played, we played that all summer long.
Moon, Narrating: The trailer park where Jesse grew up – it’s in a town so small that half of it’s Main Street is technically in another village. And right next to the trailer park, covering more than half the entire town, is 15 square miles of tall red pines and swampy, tangled forest. Bear Brook State Park.
Morgan: We were able to roam because we weren’t in a city. We weren’t – you know, my parents weren’t worried so much about me because they just figured I was over there or over there. You know, there was only many places to go when we were kids.
[‘80S MUSIC FADES BACK IN]
Moon, Narrating: Then, one day, in the middle of this game, something strange happened. Jesse was riding the four-wheeler. His friends, Scott and Keith, were supposed to be hiding. And then one of them gave himself away by yelling out.
Morgan: I believe it was Keith said that he found a barrel…
[MUSIC IN]
Morgan: …just out in the woods, you know, there was a barrel out there.
Moon, Narrating: The barrel was a blue, 55-gallon steel drum. It was covered up with a lid, but whoever closed it hadn’t gotten a tight seal. Something was squeezing through, underneath the top. It was a plastic bag.
Morgan: Scott and Keith both got off the four-wheeler. And Keith was, like, trying to pull the top of the barrel off. And when he got the edge of the tarp off, we got hit with, like, this smell of, like, rotten milk.
Moon, Narrating: The kids weren’t really sure what to make of this. So, they did the only thing a group of 11-year-old boys could think to do – they kicked it over.
Morgan: When we knocked the barrel over. The top came open a little more. We didn’t see into it or anything, but we saw, like, something white was starting to drizzle out of the top of the barrel. And again, I’m thinking it’s rotten milk.
Moon, Narrating: And then, they left. They rode away on the four-wheeler without ever looking inside the barrel.
[MUSIC OUT, LOW ENGINE VROOMING SOUND]
Morgan: That was it. That was… we left.
[VROOMING SOUND FADES OUT]
Moon, Narrating: This is the moment where the story stops being like an ‘80s movie. Jesse and his friends walked away from the mystery.
[MUSIC IN]
Moon, Narrating: Had they looked inside the barrel, what they would have found were two bodies. Heavily decomposed, partially dismembered.
[MUSIC POST]
Moon, Narrating: This moment in the woods is the first in a case where every convention about how true crime stories usually unfold is upended. Where everything about how a murder investigation is supposed to work, happens in reverse. Where each break in the case seems to raise more questions than it answers. It’s the first clue that this story is not going to go the way you think it is.
John Cody: How does an entire family just go missing?
Moon, Narrating: This is the story of a serial killer police would come to know as “The Chameleon.”
Elaine Ramos: I’m sure she fought.
Moon: That’s very…
Elaine: I have to believe that she fought.
Moon, Narrating: The story of victims. Some of them well-remembered, some of them nameless.
Ronda Randall: What grandmother let this happen, or what neighbor, or what bus driver or, you know, I mean, where were all of you? I mean, where were you, you know?
Moon, Narrating: And it’s the story of a frustrating investigation that after decades of failure led to a forensic breakthrough that has forever changed the science of solving murders.
Billy Jensen: I mean this is the biggest step forward for solving crimes since the discovery of DNA itself.
This is Bear Brook. I’m Jason Moon.
[MUSIC UP AND OUT]
Moon, Narrating: I am not a crime reporter. Or, I wasn’t, until I discovered this story.
I first learned about the Bear Brook murders in late 2015 when I was assigned to cover a press conference about the case. I had only been living in New Hampshire for about six months. I didn’t know anything about the case.
At the time I was more concerned with covering the New Hampshire presidential primary. The week before, I was being crushed by a throng of other reporters while trying to follow Hillary Clinton down a hallway.
But aside from the primary, New Hampshire is pretty quiet. There isn’t the same urgency to news that there is in some other places. It’s the sort of state where a rogue bear can… and has… dominated a news cycle.
So, when I learned that in 1985, bodies were discovered only 20 minutes or so from the NHPR newsroom, and that police still hadn’t identified them 30 years later, it stuck with me. How is that possible, with all the DNA testing and modern forensic techniques? How could they not even know who the victims are?
After the news conference, I filed a short story for the newsroom and went back to my usual beat. But I never forgot about the Bear Brook case. It became a kind of side project, something to look into when I wasn’t sitting at a town hall meeting, or covering the state legislature.
And one of the first things I wanted to learn more about was the town where the bodies were found. The town where Jesse Morgan, who found the barrel as a kid grew up. A town with a population just shy of 4,300.
Kevin Morgan: You got it?
Jason Moon: Sounded good.
Moon, Narrating: Allenstown, New Hampshire.
Ann Morgan: We were only going to be there a few years…
Kevin Morgan: Yup.
Ann Morgan: …and then he started the business, and then life went on, and before you know it…
Moon, Narrating: Jesse’s parents, Ann and Kevin Morgan moved to Allenstown in the 1970s into a trailer park called Bear Brook Gardens. The Morgans have been married a long time. They’re not exactly finishing each other’s sentences, but they do have a way of talking at the same time.
Kevin Morgan: I mean, the only secrets would be behind the walls of the – in the homes. But, you know, to socialize…
Ann Morgan: And you heard things…
Kevin Morgan: ...and we used to have neighborhood parties…
Ann Morgan: ...you heard things...
Kevin Morgan: ...the neighborhood was always invited, and we, I would say we partied a little more than I would like my kids to, but…
Ann Morgan: ...We um, we heard things that would go around the park. [FADE UNDER]
In Bear Brook Gardens, the Morgans were the center of gravity for the community. They threw the big barbecues, had all the neighborhood kids over for sleepovers.
Kevin Morgan: We were all just friends.
Ann Morgan: Yup.
Kevin Morgan: And we helped each other. I can remember helpin’ people cut wood…
Ann Morgan: Yup, and Eddie, I mean, you would go up to…
Kevin Morgan: On a hard winter… I mean, there were winters 10-below up there. It was nothing in the winter. And ya know, none of the cars in the neighborhood would start, except maybe one car. We would go over, I remember goin’ to our friend’s house, and that one car would go around and start all our cars, so we could get up and go to work. [ANN LAUGHS] You know, we were all just young families, we didn’t have money, ya know? [ANN LAUGHS]
Moon, Narrating: The Morgans don’t live in Allenstown anymore, but they remember it fondly. I think in their minds they picture it like a postcard of country living. But that’s not exactly how everyone remembers it.
Moon: So, say your name real quick. It’s Mont…
Ron Montplaisir: Ron Montplaisir.
Moon: Montplaisir.
Montplaisir: It can be pronounced differently.
Moon, Narrating: Ron Montplaisir was a police officer in Allenstown for 23 years.
Montplaisir: It was [LAUGHs] to describe it… On a Saturday afternoon, warm Saturday afternoon, people would start drinking about 10 o’clock in the morning.
Moon, Narrating: Ron wears a beanie. He’s got a big laugh that he covers with one hand. After retiring in 2002, he opened a cleaning supply shop about 20 minutes from Allenstown. We spoke standing behind the counter of that shop, surrounded by vacuum cleaner parts and bottles of cleaning spray. Montplaisir enjoys talking about his days on the force. He liked being a cop.
Montplaisir: I think every kid in the neighborhood either wanted to be a police officer or a firefighter.
Moon, Narrating: And he liked Allenstown, even if it wasn't a model community.
Montplaisir: You talk about noise complaints, the country music was, was blaring! [LAUGHS] Not that I don’t like country music. I do like country music. But, uh, as, as the alcohol flew, the music got louder and louder and the calls – ha! – started to come in.
Moon, Narrating: When the calls did come in, Montplaisir answered many of them on his own. Back then, there was usually only one officer on patrol in Allenstown at any given time. One cop for 20 square miles.
[MUSIC IN]
Montplaisir: That’s a lot of area of patrolling and there’s only one patrolman on and it’s real, real hard to find, to cover everything.
Moon, Narrating: That was particularly true when it came to the state park.
[MUSIC POST]
Moon, Narrating: Bear Brook State Park. It covers more than half of Allenstown. The trailer park where Ann, Kevin, and Jesse Morgan lived hugs the Northern edge of the state park. If you walked out the Morgan’s back door in a straight line, it would be more than five miles before you saw another house.
It’s hard to capture just how dense and tangled the park is. There are some areas of Bear Brook that are easy to get to. A fly-fishing pond, an archery station, a spiderweb of mountain-biking trails.
But most of the 15 square miles is thick and marshy. Aside from a couple of viewless hills, much of the park is flat, so you never have a good idea where you are or where you’ve been. And it’s wild, even for New Hampshire. Officer Montplaisir says his old police chief used to take him out into the park, just for the fun of it.
Montplaisir: He used to take me to catch rattlesnakes, timber rattlesnakes. And I never believed that there were rattlesnakes in New Hampshire, and sure enough he goes, “Come on, we’re going to go catch some rattlesnakes.” And I’m like, “We are?!” And, um, sure as heck, we come back with a couple of timber rattlers.
Moon, Narrating: What he’s trying to say is… this place is big.
Montplaisir: It’s huge! It’s not the kinda place you just drive cars into.
[MUSIC UP AND OUT]
Moon, Narrating: Officer Ron Montplaisir had been on the force in Allenstown for about five years, dealing mostly with drunk drivers, domestic disputes, and noise complaints. Small-town cop stuff. Until 1985.
Montplaisir: I was on duty. I was the officer that received the call.
Moon: Oh, so you were the first–
Montplaisir] I was the first one on the scene.
Moon, Narrating: The call was from a hunter. Montplaisir drove out to meet him at the edge of the woods.
Montplaisir: And I met him and he said, “I think you need to go up on the hill and take a look in the barrel. I think there’s a body up there.”
Moon, Narrating: Montplaisir remembers that the hunter looked pale. He told him to stay behind with the squad car while he headed out into the woods alone.
Montplaisir: I… knowing the area, uh, knew that a lot of people disposed of their pets back there. Thinking nothing of it – “Eh, it’s probably an animal.” And it was hunting season, somebody maybe had, ya know, gotten a deer and brought the carcass out there.
[MUSIC IN]
Moon, Narrating: He struck out through the woods – first along a path, and then eventually bushwhacking a bit through the scrub.
Montplaisir: The barrel was on the ground. And there was a bag and when I opened the bag, the face was – the decomposed face was lookin’ right at me.
Moon, Narrating: It was November, 1985. A few months after Jesse Morgan and his friends had kicked over the barrel. Now Officer Montplaisir was looking at that same barrel. But unlike the kids, he knew what was really inside.
[MUSIC UP AND OUT]
Moon, Narrating: Allenstown Police Officer Ron Montplaisir found himself alone in the woods, confronted by the face of the human remains he had just discovered. The weight of the situation began to press down on him.
Montplaisir: You know, this is major. This is, this is, this isn’t somebody parking in the fire lane. This, this is… You got bodies, you got people!
Moon, Narrating: Ron says his training from the police academy suddenly kicked in. He knew what to do.
Montplaisir: I’m like, “Secure the area.”
[MUSIC IN]
Moon, Narrating: He began staking out the perimeter of a crime scene. But aside from the barrel, there wasn’t much else to see. Trees. And how exactly do you stake out a perimeter in a forest this big? How far do you stretch the police tape? Montplaisir radioed for backup. He was the only patrolman on duty, so Allenstown officers must’ve been called in from their homes. And even then, cops turned to local residents for help.
Kevin Morgan: I think I was still in bed. And, uh, I– We heard a knock on the door and it was the police, and he said, “Kevin, we need to deputize you to keep the press out.” And he told me that they found bodies up at the pit.
Moon, Narrating: As Kevin Morgan put on his boots to go help the police, his wife Ann was suddenly reminded of something their son Jesse had told her a few months earlier, about a game of hide-and-seek and a barrel that they’d found in the woods.
Ann Morgan: It just came to me, you know, the smell. “It came out like milk,” he said.
Moon, Narrating: How long was the barrel lying there? How many times had people walked right by, never realizing what was out there?
Ann Morgan: And I just knew that that was the one.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
Moon, Narrating: The barrel contained two bodies. One was a woman, the other a young girl. Investigators haven’t released photos of the remains, so I haven’t seen them. The details they have released, though, are grim.
The remains were almost entirely skeletal. They were nude, they were dismembered – apparently to fit inside the barrel – and they were wrapped in plastic tied together with electrical wire. Their skulls revealed that they were both killed by blows to the head with a blunt instrument.
Based on the level of decomposition, investigators guessed the bodies had been in the barrel for anywhere from several months to a few years.
[MUSIC IN]
Moon, Narrating: Investigators often say that in a missing persons case, the first 48 hours are the most important. That’s because if you don’t find the person by then, your odds of ever finding them are really small.
In a murder case, the first priority is to identify the victims. Most victims know their killers. But to know who the victim knew, you have to know who the victim is. And just like in a missing persons case, if investigators don’t get this part figured out, their odds of success are really small.
New Hampshire State Police took the lead in the Bear Brook investigation. And they immediately began by trying to ID the victims. Their working theory was that, given the ages, the victims were likely a mother and daughter. So, they started searching for missing persons reports that matched.
Meanwhile, the Allenstown PD started canvassing the town. Montplaisir says that’s usually how crimes in Allenstown were solved. With all those neighborhood barbeques, not to mention all the drinking, gossip had a way of getting around. And he had his ways of getting it out of people.
Montplaisir: We used to call it, “Let’s go fishing.” Ya know, you’d make a motor vehicle stop and you knew somebody that may know some information about a crime. My, my line was, “Ya know any good fishing spots?” And, uh, they knew what I was talking about. We weren’t actually going fishing. But, ya know, that meant the difference between receiving a warning and receiving a summons, or just helping me out. And there was always somebody who knew a good fishing spot – always!
Moon, Narrating: Whether it was a murder or a petty theft, this is how policework went in Allenstown in 1985. No high-tech forensics team. No criminal psychologists coming up with a suspect profile. Just a few patrol officers like Montplaisir rattling the bushes, hoping something would fall out. Only, nothing did.
Montplaisir: And that was the first thing that threw me off is like… This was strange, because everybody knew everything over there.
[MUSIC OUT]
Moon, Narrating: Meanwhile, the state police were having their own issues. They couldn’t find any reports of a missing mother and daughter. Not in New Hampshire, not in neighboring states, not anywhere. Whoever these people were, it seemed that no one was looking for them.
As the months started to roll by, police tried lots of ways to get any sort of a foothold in the case. They checked the records of every elementary school in the state for some trace of the child victim. They examined five years of campground records at Bear Brook State Park. They sent out nationwide bulletins to law enforcement agencies with descriptions of the victims. They looked for matches to the adult victim in FBI databases of dental records. None of it worked.
One corporal in the New Hampshire State Police called it the most frustrating case of his life.
In 1986, several months after the barrel was discovered, composite sketches of the victims were made. The artist didn’t have a lot to go on – just their hair and bone structure, so there was a lot of room for interpretation.
But however inaccurate they may be, the sketches do manage to give the victims some measure of identity.
[MUSIC IN]
Moon, Narrating: Since no one knew what they looked like in life, seeing the drawings was kind of like seeing them for the first time.
The adult victim looks tired. Her face is long, her cheeks a little gaunt. A shadow falls across her face. Detectives estimated she was in her mid-to-late 20s when she died. She was between 5-foot-2 and 5-foot-8. She had wavy light brown hair.
The girl is drawn in profile. She has a small upturned nose. She wears a ponytail of dirty blond hair with bangs swept across her forehead. Detectives think she was somewhere around 9 or 10 years old when she was murdered.
When these sketches were released, calls started coming in. Investigators thought they might have something. But none of the tips panned out.
Back in Allenstown, all anybody could do was speculate. Theories about the victims and who killed them were all over the place, ranging from organized crime to runaways and carnival workers. It seemed like everyone had a guess.
Jessie Morgan: I, I can’t see them not being local. Ya know, it, it could’ve been someone that lived up the street from me.
Kevin Morgan: I always had it in my mind that it was a trucker living a double life.
Ann Morgan: I don’t feel that they, they took them from the park, although they could have–
Kevin Morgan: Yeah.
Ann Morgan: –because it abutted that area.
Montplaisir: Pure speculation. I mean, I’m playin’ the Ouija board, but, but it’s my gut feeling, you’re gonna find that, I would say, within a 200, 250 mile radius of New Hampshire and I would say South, Southwest.
Moon: It’s like, it’s irresistible for people to just start speculating. You just wanna, like, know, right?
Montplaisir: You wanna know.
Moon, Narrating: As the months turned to years, investigators started to run out of ideas. To some, it seemed their best hope was to simply wait for the killer, or someone who knew them, to come forward on their own.
[MUSIC OUT]
Moon, Narrating: In 1987, less than two years after the barrel was found, state police decided to release the victim’s bodies so they could be buried.
Officer Ron Montplaisir’s chief – the one who had shown him the rattlesnakes in the state park – organized the funeral. He told a local reporter at the time, quote, “Just because we don’t know their names doesn’t mean they don’t deserve the same respect we do.”
Parishioners of St. John the Baptist Church in Allenstown pooled their money and paid for a gravesite at the church cemetery. A Catholic priest and a Methodist minister led a burial ceremony where the bodies were laid to rest in a single steel casket. Just a handful of town officials and reporters were there to see it.
Montplaisir: Every time I used to patrol and go by that tombstone, ya know, the wheels kept on turning. “Was I on patrol that night when these bodies were dumped?” And all the officers would think that. “When did this happen? How did I miss this?” You start second-guessing yourself.
Moon, Narrating: Burying the bodies seemed like the right thing to do, especially given that two years in, the case was going nowhere. But it also must have seemed like law enforcement had given up hope.
Ann Morgan: I was disappointed. All of a sudden, now, the next thing I know, the town’s getting together to put a headstone on these bodies and… what the hell? These… Where, who are these people?!
[MUSIC IN]
Moon, Narrating: For years, Jesse Morgan’s parents kept the sketches of the victims pinned to their fridge. Like a lot of people in Allenstown, they’d always thought of their town as a good place. Now, they struggled to reconcile that idea with what happened.
Ann Morgan: It was a whole different, different world for us. Ya know, it was like two worlds. Like, there was this evil world going on that we had no idea about, and there was this good, wholesome world that was going on with, with the rest of the, with the families and the children.
Moon, Narrating: For Jesse Morgan, who, as a kid stumbled across the bodies without really knowing it, the episode changed the woods of his childhood forever.
Jesse Morgan: I do remember going out myself, like, on rainy days or whatever, and walking around, like, out there, out in the where we never went, to see if I could find something. You know, like, is there more?
[MUSIC POST]
Moon, Narrating: Turns out, there was.
[MUSIC UP AND OUT]
Moon, Narrating: In the year 2000, John Cody was a detective in the state police’s major crime unit. The unit handles most of the homicides in New Hampshire and Cody had worked a long time to make it there.
By that time, 15 years had passed since the barrel in Allenstown was discovered, and that mystery was just one on a long list of the state’s unsolved cases. And the way those cases were handled back then, it was pretty informal.
John Cody: Basically, what used to happen is, when you got assigned to the Major Crime Unit, you would get assigned one or two or sometimes three cold cases. And when I picked up the Allenstown case, um, I, I didn’t know anything about this case.
Moon, Narrating: Cody was expected to work on the case, basically in his free time, whenever he wasn’t working an active case. But Cody says the details of the Bear Brook murders just kept gnawing at him.
Cody: It’s just, it’s the type of case where you start reading it – you know, it’s sort of like getting into an engrossing book. You start to read the first chapter and you just want to go on to the second, which makes you go on to the third, etcetera.
Moon, Narrating: Cody decided to get a look at the evidence in person. He went to the evidence storage area, where he saw the blue barrel, the plastic, the electrical wire. Clues that had been sitting idle for 15 years.
Cody: I’m a very visual person. So, I decided one day, it was actually a Friday, and I said, “I’m gonna to go out, I’m gonna go see the area and try to, try to get an idea of what it is I’m looking at through words.”
Moon, Narrating: Cody drove out to Allenstown and walked into the woods. He brought the case file with him as a sort of map. First, he tried to find the area where Jesse Morgan and his friends had first found the barrel as kids. He pictured the kids on the four-wheeler. The barrel in the brush.
Cody: I was walkin’ through that – I’d been out there for quite a while and then I kinda just widened my area a little bit. Almost like throwing a rock into a pond, you have those concentric rings that come out.
Moon, Narrating: Cody ventured further and further from the spot where the barrel was found, his eyes scanning the forest floor for anything that didn’t belong.
It was getting late in the afternoon, the sun was sinking behind the hills. And the canopy of trees overhead in Bear Brook State Park made it even darker. Cody was thinking about how he might need to go back out to his car for his flashlight.
Cody: And, uh, that’s when I came across… um, the barrel.
[MUSIC IN]
Moon, Narrating: A barrel was on its side next to a small boulder in some brush. Cody recognized it right away. He had been looking at a barrel just like it in evidence storage a few days before. Dark blue. Fifty-five gallons.
[MUSIC POST]
Moon, Narrating: Cody decided now was a good time to get the flashlight after all. He made his way back out to the edge of the woods, his mind racing the whole time.
Cody: You know, I think I was trying to talk myself out of it the whole way to the car, going, “This is definitely not what I think it is.”
Moon, Narrating: When Cody returned with his flashlight, he shined it inside the barrel. And all he could see was some kind of plastic.
Cody: I tore the plastic away and there was something white that was shining towards me – you know, it kind of sticks out with the dark background. Um, when I looked at it I said, “Umm… This does not look good.”
Moon, Narrating: It was a stunning discovery, one that raised a whole new set of questions, some of them uncomfortable for police.
John Cody was standing just 300 feet from where the first barrel was found, a full 15 years before. Inside the second barrel were two more bodies.
[MUSIC UP AND OUT]
Moon, Narrating: Coming up on Bear Brook…
[THEME MUSIC IN]
Taylor Quimby: When you hear the phrase “a stone’s throw away,” [MOON LAUGHS] this is what they’re talking about.
Kevin Morgan: Why wasn’t that barrel found?
Ann Morgan: We don’t know.
Kevin Morgan: How could it– Ya know, I don’t under– to me, that’s…
Ann Morgan: It’s crazy!
Benjamin Agati: I want to thank everybody for coming today. We have some new testing results that we want to share with basically the world.
Elaine Ramos, On the Phone: I opened the door and saw his face. I had a chill run down my back that I’ve never in my life ever had before.
Roxane Gruenheid: Sometimes it’s that dumb luck that you just come across somethin’ and it just opens a door for you. And once you open the door, it’s like, “Ahhh!” The lights come on and you can see everything, you know what I mean? The jigsaw puzzle comes together.
[THEME MUSIC UP AND OUT]
[CREDITS MUSIC IN]
Moon, Narrating: Bear Brook is reported and produced by me, Jason Moon.
Taylor Quimby is Senior Producer.
Editing help from Cori Princell, Todd Bookman, Lauren Chooljian, Sam Evans-Brown, Britta Green, and Annie Ropeik.
The Executive Producer is Erika Janik.
Dan Barrick is NHPR’s News Director.
Director of Content is Maureen McMurray.
NHPR’s Digital Director is Rebecca Lavoie.
Photography and video by Allie Gutierrez.
Graphics and interactives by Sara Plourde.
Original music for this show was composed by me, Jason Moon, and Taylor Quimby.
Additional music in this episode from Blue Dot Sessions, and Simple Minds.
To see a timeline of the Bear Brook investigation from 1985 until 2015, go to our website bearbrookpodcast.org.
Bear Brook is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.
[CREDITS MUSIC FADES OUT]