Years after his death, the story of a serial killer is finally being told

By RAY DUCKLER

Monitor staff

Published: 01-31-2017 12:53 AM

For a brief period, the buttoned-up attorney general didn’t sound buttoned up.

Not this time. Not when talking about Bob Evans, or Lawrence William Vanner, or whatever the guy’s name was, the guy who killed four females in the 1980s and then dumped them, in barrels, in the Allenstown woods.

“Every homicide case is unqiue, but this case is like no other I’ve worked on,” Jeff Strelzin told me by phone from his office in Concord. “And this case is like no other anyone else I know here has worked on. When I first heard about it, it just blew me away.”

Same thing on the other coast, with Capt. Roxane Gruenheid, who’s worked for the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department in California for 25 years. She found the killer’s first victim, in 2002 in Richmond, Calif., and nailed him. She dropped her guard a bit when I asked for comment on this serial killer, finally identified last week in a bizarre 36-year-old mystery. He died in a California prison in 2010 of natural causes.

“Thrilled,” Gruenheid told me, “and tickled to pieces.”

They connected dots in this case, so now their professional dots are also connected, dots that are 3,000 miles apart. They’re trained to maintain an even keel when addressing the media, and while both for the most part stuck to that code, slivers of excitement and emotion slipped through.

How could it not? Here was a man whose name we still don’t know, whose age we don’t know, whose background we don’t know. Strelzin, the senior assistant attorney general, called the killer “a chameleon.”

The chameleon blended in well enough to avoid capture after leaving the Manchester apartment he shared with 23-year-old Denise Beaudin and her six-month-old daughter in 1981.

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From there, the chameleon changed his name. He left here as Bob Evans, and then he was Vanner and Curtis Mayo Kimball and Jerry Mockerman and Don Vannerson and on and on. 

In reality, he was none of those people, and now Strelzin and Gruenheid worry that the murderer killed someone else, someone they don’t know about yet. Or maybe more than one person.

He’s already killed as many as seven people that we know of. Even that’s not clear. It started with Beaudin, who’s never been found. Strelzin thinks she was killed sometime after they headed west, and after he had already killed four still-unidentified females, who were found near Bear Brook State Park.

One barrel containing a woman and a child was found in 1985, the other with two children in 2000, 100 yards away. By then the chameleon had gotten lost in his environment out west, working as a handyman and living in the back of a convenience store. He met a woman named Eunsoon Jun. He conned her. He was good at that, choosing the right women, those with a weak spot, those with some insecurities.

“I rode with him downtown when we fingerprinted him,” Gruenheid told me. “He had extremely twinkly bright blue eyes and at that time he was charming and talkative and very intelligent. He was super smart, and he was very calculating.”

From what Gruenheid learned, Jun was smart, too, and also artsy and trusting. She worked for a bio tech company and loved doing pottery work. She might have met the chameleon while he was repairing something at a Korean restaurant. Jun needed help at her nearby home.

“She met him and needed some work done,” Gruenheid said. “She needed carpentry work and he went to work at her property.”

He moved in, isolated Jun from her family and married her in the backyard, in a unofficial ceremony that lacked a marriage license.

Then he hit her on the head with something and killed her. Jun’s friends wondered where she was, and the chameleon always had an answer to keep things normal. Jun left to care for her sick mother, he said. She went to check on property they owned in Oregon.

“He had a keen ability to convince you of truths and he sounded convincing and people would go away and expect her to call them in the next couple of weeks and they would move on,” Gruenheid said. “One friend did not believe a damn thing that guy told her.”

So she went to the police, to Gruenheid and her partner. They went to the couple’s house on Bernhard Avenue, brought the chameleon downtown and learned the chameleon was not who he said he was, was not Lawrence William Vanner.

It was then that Gruenheid and her partner went back to the house. They moved through the garage, past the painted pottery and kiln that Jun had loved so much, and opened a door into the basement.

They found a 250-pound pile of cat litter, about 2½ feet tall and five feet around. They found Jun buried in it. They found a spray bottle with green liquid in it. Deodorizer.

The chameleon pled guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 15 years to life. Then came those dots, the ones that connected, the pieces to a puzzle that told investigators that the chameleon was a serial killer.

Gruenheid did some checking and learned the chameleon had abandoned Denise Beaudin’s daughter, Lisa, when she was about five years old. She found that three felony warrants had been issued in Santa Cruz, Calif., regarding crimes connected to Lisa’s abandonment.

She found out that the chameleon had served three years related to that case, then bolted the day after he was paroled in 1990. She found out he’d been a fugitive for 12 years, throughout the 1990s, by the time he killed Jun. And, after initiating DNA testing, she learned that Lisa was not the chameleon’s biological child.

“That started an over-10-year journey to try to ID who Lisa was,” Gruenheid told me. “We needed to find her true birth certificate and her name and family that was still alive.”

Back here, Strelzin was beginning his new job at the attorney general’s office. One day, before he went mountain biking at Bear Brook State Park, a prosecutor told him a strange story, the one about the two barrels, about the never-identified four dead females, found near where Strelzin loved to bike.

“I couldn’t believe I’d never heard about it,” Strelzin said. “At the time we thought an entire family had been murdered out there and there was not a peep from anyone wondering where they were.”

Strelzin had help, from the state police, the Manchester and Allenstown police departments, the FBI, California county sheriffs’ departments, the FBI and federal missing children organizations.

Finally, things clicked. Officials discovered family links to Lisa, a first cousin and grandfather, here in New Hampshire. That proved that Lisa, born Dawn Beaudin, was the daughter of missing person Denise Beaudin.

Denise had left town with the chameleon in 1981. He’d worked as an electrician at Waumbec Mills, which was closing, and he had helped move stuff from there to someone’s nearby property, which lined Bear Brook State Park.

“It was so amazing the moment when you find the linkage,” Strelzin said. “He not only went to the property, but he was dumping stuff there in barrels. That was an amazing revelation in this case.”

And when DNA testing showed that the middle girl found in Allenstown was, in fact, the chameleon’s daughter, officials knew this long-running drama, this future book and movie, this stranger-than-fiction story, was nearing an end.

Sort of.

Police checked the Manchester home that Beaudin, her daughter and the chameleon had left in 1981, hoping to find Denise’s remains. They didn’t.

That’s when the attorney general’s office and the State Police Cold Case Unit hosted a press conference, with Strelzin, Capt. Ryan Grant, a detective with the Manchester Police Department, and Sgt. Mike Kokoski, head of the cold case unit.

Media from throughout New England showed up last week. We were told the chameleon had died in prison after killing Jun. We were also told that loose ends remained. Where was the mother of the chameleon’s child? The woman found in one of those barrels could have been the mother of the other two girls found there, so where was their father? Are there more victims?

And after changing his color so often, will we ever learn who the chameleon really was?

The impact here is obvious. Just listen to two buttoned-up people who helped solve the case.

“Every time I’m at Bear Brook mountain biking,” Strelzin said, “I’ve thought about this case. And that’s for 16 years.”

Added Gruenheid, “Whatever his name is, he’s a bad, bad man.”

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